Comment by vitorbaptistaa

I pulled apart my Yoto mini! I found an unencrypted ESP32, and managed to pull the firmware off it too.

My reverse engineering skills are limited, so my journey has paused there for now, but I would _love_ to be able to map out all the hardware & write open source firmware for it.

The Yoto set up is very smart (the NFC cards hold a Yoto URL, which responds with a JSON document describing the music & links to MP3s on S3, or m3u files for internet radio).

The only downside is that the Yoto will _only_ follow what I presume are allow-listed URLs, and has SSL certs for those URLs baked in, so if the company ever goes under the devices would lose almost all functionality, without new firmware.

I want to support Yoto as these devices are really great, but I’d also love to be able to drop my own URLs on cards and: - Play tracks from Plex like OP - Trigger lighting/mood changes with HomeAssistant as well as play an album - Play the music on network speakers (eg. Sonos), using the Yoto as the source

If anyone feels like they’d be interested in helping reverse engineer them, do reply!

> especially when friends come over. Books or CDs become a conversation.

There's nothing worse than when having people over, and sitting in front of a computer or device isolating from the group. The physical medium of vinyl albums or even CDs allow interaction with everyone instead of someone just clicking on a screen some where. What I read on an album covers might not be the same thing you read and take away from it. It just makes music sharing so much more personal.

Yeah, yoto works really nice for the same purpose. My kid's got lots of custom music on the blanks now. Both soundtracks from movies and custom playlists. I suspect it's going to transform into more of albums in the next years. Whether purchased or DIY, it's also a great solution to giving agency to a 3yo without something like "have an ipad with the whole spotify".

CDs are now actually also joining vinyls in being revived for physical merch purposes. They're no longer needed, but if you want them they are available for purchase.

+1 for a yoto.

It also led to my biggest ‘Doh’ moment with tech.

My sister showed it to me at a holiday house where we had no internet. I thought it was awesome, an offline music/audio player that her daughter could use. She mentioned you could make your own cards. It immediately reminded me of making mix tape cassettes and cds as a child.

I bought one the next week without doing any further research.

When it arrived and asked me to connect it to the wifi I was very confused.

I realised I made a massive assumption that “someone had solved the NFC card memory capacity problem”. I’d seen it work without internet and made all these assumptions about how it worked.

Obviously wrong in hindsight.

Still a great piece of kit, but I’d love something that was more akin to a cassette players rec/play/rewind/rec & Physical medium.

But portable cassette recorders still exist…

You can also add stream URLs to a card. Thus we have a "radio" card which lets my son play radio stations from all over the world.

There is a technical difference though - yolo keeps the audio on the cards, while this project uses NFC tags to select locally stored audio. To have truly collectable experience, yolo type of thing is the only choice.