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.