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A Dad Built a Story Box That Plays When His Kids Set a Figure on It...
Arnaud Aubry built a story box for his three kids, and three months before that he knew absolutely nothing about electronics. A child sets a figurine on top, and the box plays whatever story goes with it. He named it Marelleo, after marelle, the French word for hopscotch, and after Marceau, Ella and Léonie, the kids it belongs to.
On his blog, Zebra Rodeo, he lays out why he bothered, and I was nodding the whole way.
The README on GitHub says an NFC sticker goes under each figurine and the stories live on a microSD card, with no screen, account or subscription, and nothing that leaves the house. You send files from a web page and pair them with a figurine, or give a figurine a web address and the box plays the stream without storing it. Five assembled boards ran about 160 euros from JLCPCB.
If you're staring at a shelf of Tonies, I'd read the Show HN thread, which drew 177 points on Hacker News.
One commenter says custom Tonies go for about $8 apiece for up to 90 minutes of your own audio, and another points out the Yoto has an API. Aubry put Marelleo under the MIT license, so anybody can build their own.
With the Lunii, the Yoto and the Toniebox, every new title is a purchase from a catalog he doesn't choose, on an object he doesn't control, which is why he calls them a subscription dressed up as a wooden toy. Hackaday already wrote up a dad named Mario who built Boxie to replace his three-year-old's Toniebox, which needed internet and had limited media.
His box runs on an ESP32, a microcontroller with WiFi that sells for a handful of euros and still decodes MP3.