[HN Gopher] Reverse engineering the Ravensburger TipToi pen
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Reverse engineering the Ravensburger TipToi pen
Author : cl3misch
Score : 87 points
Date : 2024-12-02 10:06 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| unwind wrote:
| I had never heard of this, and the repo doesn't provide a lot of
| background ... it seems to be a handheld (!) pen with interactive
| point-for-audio features, for 2+ year-olds.
|
| Here [1] is the Ravensburger product page in German and here [2]
| is some toy seller's page.
|
| [1]: https://www.ravensburger.de/de-DE/produkte/tiptoi
|
| [2]: https://www.playpolis.com/ravensburger/tiptoi
| netsharc wrote:
| The git repo feels like German bureaucracy, one needs to dig
| around to find the info....
|
| https://github.com/entropia/tip-toi-reveng/wiki/PEN-Optical-...
|
| TL; DR: the tip of a pen has a sensor, the books have dot
| patterns overlaid on top of image areas, the patterns are
| decipherable into (hexa-)decimal code, and with a script file
| the codes do different actions (set a variable, play an audio
| file).
| ce4 wrote:
| The pen's main function is to point at things in the TipToi
| books and its integrated speaker explains the thing being
| pointed at, or plays a song or whatever the book is about.
| There is a huge catalogue of books for e.g. learning names of
| things in the kitchen, at a farm, fairy tales and even
| languages etc. It's great stuff and works well
|
| There are different models and the newest one has a record
| feature as well as wifi (for asset downloads, versions before
| need a download companion app on the PC/mac).
|
| Edit: fix typos
| rob74 wrote:
| I had the TipToi's precursor as a kid:
| https://www.erinnerstdudich.de/70er/elexikon-von-ravensburge...
| (scroll down to the comments for more pictures).
|
| This used a much simpler device - basically it consisted of two
| electrical probes connected with a wire, one of them containing
| batteries and a light bulb, and it worked together with a board
| with contact pads with hidden interconnections. Then there were
| several sheets where you had to find the numbers in the picture
| corresponding to the labels printed along the right side of the
| sheet.
|
| I also like the honesty of the text on the box saying that it's
| "electrical", when the temptation to (incorrectly) use
| "electronical" instead must have been great...
| peepee1982 wrote:
| Ah! I salvaged one of those from the local waste collection
| center and it was an easy fix to make it work again!
|
| I had a Questron pen as a child and loved it, also made by
| Ravensburger.
| croisillon wrote:
| i had a questron too! much closer to the tiptoi than to
| elexikon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42338848
| peepee1982 wrote:
| Yes, wireless even. Pretty nifty.
| globalise83 wrote:
| As an immigrant father of 2 small children, living in Germany for
| the past few years, I have found that Germany has some real
| "hidden champions" amongst the tech-enabled learning products
| space. This Tip-toi product and associated ecosystem is one of
| them, and another is Tonies, which is a kind of audio player in a
| nice cushioned box that uses cartoon-like figures to choose which
| audio books to play.
| peepee1982 wrote:
| I am a father of three small ones in Austria. The Tonies are
| cute, but I find them just so frivolously expensive!
|
| My children loved to listen on audio books on CDs (can be
| rented from libraries or bought for cheap) or on an old 1st gen
| iPod.
| niemandhier wrote:
| Check your local library, ours has dozens of these tonnes.
| Xylakant wrote:
| Time to advertise the Phoniebox https://phoniebox.de/,
| building you own Tonie clone with NFC chips and a raspberry
| pie. (some assembly required)
| peepee1982 wrote:
| That's great! I was looking for something like this when my
| oldest was around three. He's ten now, my youngest is
| three.
|
| I might build this with my children together.
| Slartie wrote:
| We have the "Jooki Box" in use since its inception (the
| version before the current one), and it's a pretty good
| substitute. Allows to connect figurines to Spotify playlists,
| so if you have a Spotify Family subscription, you have a huge
| number of songs and audiobooks for kids at your fingertips
| with no additional cost.
|
| The original box itself was way more expensive than the
| Toniebox, like double the price, but I think they've made it
| considerably cheaper when they released the second hardware
| version of it. And the original box still works until today,
| continues to be supported by their app and has already been
| built in a very sturdy way (I've opened it up once to add
| magnets inside, so the figurines stick on it, which they
| normally don't do - that's the one thing the Toniebox people
| got right).
| cojo wrote:
| It seems the company behind this product has gone out of
| business and the product itself is no longer sold (their
| e-commerce site is still up, but the shop is empty)?
|
| Which is a bummer, as I went looking after your comment -
| Toniebox is great but I agree it feels overpriced on the
| content side (perhaps it isn't, if their competitor
| couldn't make the business model work...)
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/jooki/comments/1eltdcm/muuselabs_h
| a...
| ce4 wrote:
| I got ours all used in bundles. The box itself is rather
| repairable (broken silicone ears, dead sd card, dead battery)
| and there are sometimes very good deals on Kleinanzeigen
| classified ads.
|
| Also what helps: resale value is great, so after the Tonies
| have had their time and your kids become older... just sell
| them off.
| bonzog wrote:
| The thing I dislike most about Tonies is that they don't
| licence the original recordings for lots of the movie/TV
| themed characters.
|
| They licence the songs and then record them in-house and
| goodness me some of them are disappointing if you are
| familiar with the real soundtracks. The Moana one has the
| same two singers doing impressions of every character.
| tjungblut wrote:
| Get a flipper, you can simply download and emulate all of
| them
| cjrp wrote:
| We got a Yoto instead; uses NFC cards and you can record your
| own easily.
| smokeydoe wrote:
| I can vouch for the Yoto. We make our own cards and update
| them with new books and music whenever we want. You can add
| a custom icon that displays for each track.
| matttproud wrote:
| Father of children in Switzerland:
|
| You might want to check out https://www.hoerbert.com. This is
| a remarkably well-built, low-tech alternative. It is somewhat
| primitive, but the company seems willing to indulge customers
| who are technically inclined.
|
| As an adjacent thought on the Horbert device:
|
| Since we live very far away from family (transatlantic
| flight), we decided to have our relatives record themselves
| reading books for our kids. They shared the audio files over
| Google Drive, and we could load up the audio files onto the
| Horbert device so that our kids could listen to their custom
| audio books whenever they wanted. It provided a nice way to
| help the kids feel connected with the grandparents and such.
| With the Horbert, all that involved was ejecting the SDK card
| and amending its contents on a normal computer.
| weinzierl wrote:
| _Playmobil_ fits the bill as well. When I was a kid Playmobil
| and Lego were similarly popular and it was only much later that
| I learned that Lego is known everywhere but Playmobil is not.
| Playmobil is not as versatile as Lego but in my experience it
| is much better suited for outdoor play.
|
| A more hidden champion is Ankersteine. I have one of their
| construction kits which is in my family probably since around
| 1885 and these kits are still produced today.
| Slartie wrote:
| Playmobil has a horrible number of super-small parts that'll
| go missing really quick when taken outside.
|
| Lego has these, too, of course, but with Lego you at least
| have the benefit of being able to infinitely combine these
| parts to build stuff from them. Playmobil is "dumb" in that
| regard, you can't combine anything except in those ways in
| which it was specifically designed to be combined.
|
| The real alternative to Lego in my opinion is Duplo, from the
| same manufacturer. They have no really small parts at all, so
| these are really good for outside play. But still infinitely
| combinable.
| smartmic wrote:
| There is also Playmobil Junior [1] for toddlers - also no
| small parts and really robust. They also have very nice
| water and bathtub toys for indoors and outdoors.
|
| [1] https://www.playmobil.com/en-
| us/content/junior_themepage/jun...
| wjnc wrote:
| Ankersteine is very beautiful. Thanks for the tip. I think I
| would enjoy that myself. The bigger boxes are 16+ in age! I
| would probably struggle. And this on the day that
| 'Sinterklaas' leaves.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| There is also fischertechnik, how popular is it outside of
| Germany?
|
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischertechnik
| qurashee wrote:
| Not a good sample but I've lived in three European
| countries with my kids and I've never come across them
| before.
| weinzierl wrote:
| How could I forget to mention fischertechnik. It was the
| third member of the three most popular toys in my
| childhood, next to Playmobil and Lego.
|
| Other than Playmobil and Lego I have not seen toy
| fischertechnik for years, but I occasionally recognize
| their non-toy fixings.
|
| Fischer was the most prolific German inventor with 570
| patents, who amongst other things invented the plastic wall
| plug.
| ralfd wrote:
| The company website is almost a parody of the stereotype of
| serious German-ness. It is not a toy, no it is a serious
| learning material, so you can buy a 10000 Euro set to
| understand how an integrated factory is working:
|
| https://www.fischertechnik.de/de-de/produkte/industrie-
| und-h...
|
| There is a ,,toy" section for children, but it is to learn
| about electricity or renewable energy, and I think the real
| customer of the page are not the depicted children, but the
| papa with an engineering degree.
| fastasucan wrote:
| Wonder if that follows germanic languages. "Playmo" is well
| known in Norway.
| homarp wrote:
| Playmobil also well known in France and Spain
|
| https://www.playmobil.com/es-es/
|
| https://www.playmobil.com/fr-fr/
|
| and based on the dropdown at the bottom, quite a lot more
| countries
| Vespasian wrote:
| There was an interesting reverse engineering talk about
| tonieboxes on last years chaos communication congress [1]
|
| It's in german and I can't speak to the quality of the english
| translation which is available
|
| [1]
| https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11993-toniebox_reverse_engineeri...
| joezydeco wrote:
| I just saw these Tonies at Target (USA) last night, it looks
| like that store got the exclusive distribution rights for the
| US. $99 for the starter box? Wow.
| niemandhier wrote:
| The biggest selling point of the pen for me is, that while it
| works with special kinds of books, the books are not tied to any
| account.
|
| You can get a book from the library, buy a used one or borrow one
| from a friend, it will work with your pen.
|
| This is so refreshingly different from all those subscription
| models, that I keep buying the books and once my kids grew out of
| them I know I can gift them away.
| moring wrote:
| Note that while it seems that you need an account to download
| the audio files, this isn't actually the case. It's just the
| stupid UI on their web site that makes it look like that. If
| you find your way through that UI, you can get the audio files
| without logging in, and the pen announces itself to the host
| computer as a thumb drive -- just copy the files into the root
| directory.
|
| At least that was the case 2-3 years ago.
| heeen2 wrote:
| it is still the case and easy to find if you google for the
| title of the book plus the file extension (gme). They are
| also all listed here https://service.ravensburger.de/tiptoi%C
| 2%AE/tiptoi%C2%AE_Au...
| croisillon wrote:
| it's funny this toy seems to exist only since 2010, i used to
| have something very similar around 1991, 1992
| croisillon wrote:
| ah, questron it is
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42338088
| reid wrote:
| Looks very similar to Korea's Saypen! My daughter loves it.
| bhouston wrote:
| Does this work for the V-Tech Bugsby? or LeapFrog LeapReader?
|
| I was wondering if they are licensing the same technology base.
| Suppafly wrote:
| The leapfrog stuff is what came to mind for me, I remember we
| had similar things when my kids were little. Honestly, they
| never seemed to work very well, but I assume the newer versions
| of such things are better.
| Karliss wrote:
| Based on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4FUZcF_IC4 video
| LeapRader seems to use similar technology in the sense that
| they both are based on grid of points with offsets. Although at
| least by eye the timing/anchor dots don't seem to match the
| exact scheme described in TipToi reverse engineering repo. Also
| didn't see any obvious Sonix chips in LeapReader, at least in
| the teardown pictures I saw.
|
| Looking at the Sonix website (the company providing
| camera+decoder chip solution used by TipToi)
| https://www.sonix.com.tw/category-en-956 they seem to have at
| least 6 generations of the code with varying amount of encoded
| bits.
|
| Some of the related patents
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US6548768B1/en (Anoto
| ~1999/2003) https://patents.google.com/patent/US8061611B2/en
| (Canon ~2006/2011)
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070246547A1/en (Sonix
| ~2006/2009) https://patents.google.com/patent/US10614333B2/en
| (Sonix ~2015/2016)
|
| they seem to describe slightly different variations of data
| encoding. Searching for Anoto (company that made one of the
| first patents) leads to a bunch more products using this
| technology. List of 400+ patents
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US6548768B1/en#citedBy citing
| the Anoto 1999/2003 patent also gives a list of companies
| working on related products or technology. There are even some
| from LeapFrog but those seem to mostly cover practical
| application and UI aspects of a product using the optical
| position/code detection system.
|
| Overall feels like Anoto is focusing more on a system which
| decodes the points into X/Y coordinates and covers whole page
| with contiguous pattern, but Sonix more on having codes which
| give specific ID although they also one version which gives XY
| position similar to Anoto. That might be partially a workaround
| to make the encoding schemes different enough not to infringe
| each others patents.
|
| That doesn't really give a good answer to your question, but If
| I had to guess Leapfrog is probably buying their technology
| somewhere else possibly from Anoto.
|
| There is also one similar product using Grolier name, which
| seems to use tech from Sonix just like TipToi so potentially
| compatible, at least the codes not necessarily the book format.
| xxmarkuski wrote:
| Entropia is the local chapter from Karlsruhe of the Chaos
| Computer Club. The Gulaschprogrammiernacht (GPN) is their local
| version of Congress located in HfG and ZKM, a college and a great
| museum.
| Suppafly wrote:
| The puzzle company?
| amaurose wrote:
| I saw Joachim talk about Tiptoi years ago here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzXtgR73icg
|
| IIRC, thats the video with the talking calculator demo...
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