RE: Arduino Uno Q - USB Audio

shabaz — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 22:55:07 GMT

Nice work!

Have you (or [mention:d214a0a0f5594ee19515b2a3782e7070:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] or anyone else with kids/grandchildren etc) heard of "Tonies"? I learned about it about a month ago, it's something all mums desire for their kids (but in reality are unaffordable for parents). It is basically a cube-shaped audio player, with a NFC surface on top. Then, parents are supposed to purchase plastic toy characters which have embedded NFC tags. The child places it on the cube, and the cube makes a request to the cloud, to download the appropriate audio file (either music or an audiobook) into Flash storage. There is enough capacity to cache lots of files, so that subsequently there's no delay to download the files.

The ridiculous thing is that each plastic character costs about £15, so effectively it becomes more of a gift for aunts/uncles to give, rather than parents to buy, because a child would soon want different music/stories. It's as crazy as if iTunes were to charge £15 for a song!

Tonies is very popular, because it visually looks very "instagram-friendly", with all the cute plastic characters on magnetic shelves, so you can stick them on a wall near the child's bed etc. And when parents get together, if other mums see it on a shelf, then all of them want it for their kids. Plus, many department stores have walls full of the different characters in see-through pouches, to encourage people to build a collection for their toddlers. Really clever marketing all round.

I wish there were an open source alternative, perhaps using an off-the-shelf better quality bookcase speaker. For music, Tonies is actually very poor quality in my opinion (since it has a small speaker in a small plastic case), it hurts my ears listening to a children's song on it.

RE: Arduino Uno Q - USB Audio

DAB — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 18:13:15 GMT

Nice post, good sound.

RE: Arduino Uno Q - USB Audio

genebren — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 16:51:10 GMT

Very cool! Thanks for sharing.

I am currently working on a simple animation panel (64x32 pixels) that will include a MP3 player for my Grandkids. The idea is to allow them to generate some images that can be animated onto a fixed background image (think simple flip books with some editor tools to provide side scrolling). Tie in some triggerable sound clips to provide entertain sound bites.