This Simple RFID Music Player Lets Kids Select Their Own Tunes

Kids love music just as much as adults, even if their tastes are obnoxious and their favorites are limited in number. But children’s music makes adults want to stick screwdrivers in their ears and you will probably do absolutely anything to avoid hearing “Baby Shark” even one more time. The solution is to just let your kids play music themselves, but young children have difficulty navigating through the Spotify app and YouTube is full of inappropriate videos that you probably don’t want your kids to stumble upon. That’s why Wilksy built this simple Tiny Tonie RFID music player so his kid could easily select the songs that they want to listen to.

The RFID music player concept isn’t new, and we’ve seen several of them built for kids and older folks alike. The idea is to make music selection as intuitive as possible. Instead of scrolling through massive digital music libraries or searching for songs on YouTube, the listener can simply choose the RFID card corresponding to their desired music and tap it on the player. It’s analogous to using physical media like CDs and cassette tapes, but is completely customizable and provides access to virtually every song in existence. Each RFID card can be linked to a specific song, artist, album, playlist, or genre. Stickers on the RFID cards can contain bold titles or illustrations, so children can find the music they’re looking for even if their reading abilities are still limited.

This project was directly inspired by the consumer Toniebox, which does pretty much exactly the same thing. But the Toniebox is pretty expensive and it requires a cloud account that you connect to via WiFi. Wilksy’s Tiny Tonie music player is far more affordable to build and doesn’t have any restrictions. Instead of building this entirely from scratch, Wilksy started with a small, attractive portable Bluetooth speaker. The electronics inside of that were removed, aside from the actual speaker driver. The case was modified to fit the new components, which include an Adafruit Feather HUZZAH ESP8266, a PN532 RFID reader module, and a DFPlayer Mini MP3 player module. Those were held in place within the enclosure with a 3D-printed frame. Music is stored on an SD card and Wilksy has programmed the ESP8266 to respond to RFID cards. Some of those trigger music and others are used for control commands, such as adjusting volume, skipping songs, and pausing playback. If you have kids and are tired of queueing up music for them, you should definitely build them a Tiny Tonie music player.