Comment by jphastings

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!