Sunday, June 15, 2014

Fixing Ravensburger Tiptoi

Thanks to my college from work I had a chance to look at apparently popular toy called tiptoy. Basically it is a RFID infrared camera combined with a mp3 player. There are books with embedded RFID tags small points printed over the regular pictures. Those points are almost invisible to a human but tiptoy recognizes them and plays back some records when its tip touches tags in a book so a child gets interactive description of what is in the book. Different images or areas of images have different points pattern.
A typical problem of the tiptoy is that its speaker is not completely child proof and after some time the toy becomes mute. This particular toy worked with a headphones normal so my friend decided to try changing a speaker what solved his problem. Here come some pictures he took:

 Take batteries out, unscrew four screws.

 Take speaker out and desolder it.
Both speakers - the original one and the new not installed yet one.
This is close-up how the speaker is mounted.
You can ensure that the speaker caused a problem by measuring its resistance.
This is measured resistance of the new speaker, close to 8 Ohms is correct.

This is resistance of the damaged speaker. 2.3MOhms is almost open circuit - a speaker is damaged.

4 comments:

  1. Please note that Tiptoi is not using any RFID technology. It's using digital paper and reads it with an infrared camera.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have a Tiptoi with a game and we have not played that game for the last six months. We have replaced the batteries by new Duracell ones and the Tiptoi does not work at all. It is dead. What shall we do now ?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Does a PC detect the tiptoi connected over USB?
      Are new batteries installed correctly?
      Did you try with headphones?

      Delete
    2. same here. Fuse is ok but not switching on and no usb mode.

      Delete