I wanted to give more autonomy to my 4-year-old child in choosing and playing music. I didn’t want her to use my phone or laptop, though. I was looking for a designated music player device. I discarded the idea of CD players because CDs are not durable and are toxic waste. MP3 players, like iPods, weren’t an option either because she couldn’t just read text yet. Then I came across Toniebox, a jukebox designed for children.
Toniebox is a WiFi-connected speaker with an internal memory card. What sets it apart from other audio devices is its child-friendly interface. For instance, audio playback starts when a colorful figurine is placed on top of the speaker. Audio stops if the figurine is removed. Volume can be adjusted by pinching the ears of the box. You skip to the next song by tapping the device.
To upload songs or audiobooks to the Toniebox, you need to use the official Toniebox website. It is so because it’s part of the manifacturer’s business model. Besides the one-time hardware purchase, you can buy additional figurines to download further audio content or have more play time available when uploading custom audio.
However, there’s a hacker community around Toniebox that reverse-engineered its firmware. They found ways to get around the proprietary system to eliminate the technical limitations (e.g., the internal memory card can be replaced) and unlock creativity: children and parents can handcraft their own figurines.
I followed the Ultimate Noob Guide’s techless way to hack into our Toniebox.
First of all, I needed to access the internal SD card. IFixIt has a detailed guide on how to tear down the Toniebox. Kudos to the Toniebox team, teardown is straightforward, you only need a screwdriver. Then I decided to buy an SD card extension cable to always have the memory card accessible without the need to take the device apart. I also purchased a bunch of RFID tags to be used in our handcraft figurines.
The biggest trouble was having access to a Windows machine to be able to install the open source TeddyBench software. I run Linux so I tried the Linux port first, but I couldn’t resolve the package dependencies in a few hours. I ended up installing Windows in VirtualBox.
The only issue I ran into was that I removed the SD card while the device was still on. It put the Toniebox in an unstable state (blinking red light without any sound messages), and only restarting helped, which then removed custom content from the SD card. The lesson learned was that I had to wait until the Toniebox went into standby mode (it has a 10-minute timeout window). Then I could safely remove the memory card and insert it into my laptop to manage its content with TeddyBench.
Happy hacking and music listening!