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.
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
netsharc 19 days ago [-]
The git repo feels like German bureaucracy, one needs to dig around to find the info....
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).
niemandhier 19 days ago [-]
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 19 days ago [-]
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.
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.
Vespasian 19 days ago [-]
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
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 19 days ago [-]
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 19 days ago [-]
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.
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:
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.
weinzierl 18 days ago [-]
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.
qurashee 18 days ago [-]
Not a good sample but I've lived in three European countries with my kids and I've never come across them before.
wjnc 19 days ago [-]
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.
fastasucan 18 days ago [-]
Wonder if that follows germanic languages. "Playmo" is well known in Norway.
and based on the dropdown at the bottom, quite a lot more countries
peepee1982 19 days ago [-]
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.
bonzog 18 days ago [-]
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.
matttproud 18 days ago [-]
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 Hörbert 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 Hörbert 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 Hörbert, all that involved was ejecting the SDK card and amending its contents on a normal computer.
Slartie 19 days ago [-]
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 18 days ago [-]
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…)
Time to advertise the Phoniebox https://phoniebox.de/, building you own Tonie clone with NFC chips and a raspberry pie. (some assembly required)
peepee1982 18 days ago [-]
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.
niemandhier 19 days ago [-]
Check your local library, ours has dozens of these tonnes.
ce4 18 days ago [-]
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.
cjrp 18 days ago [-]
We got a Yoto instead; uses NFC cards and you can record your own easily.
smokeydoe 18 days ago [-]
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.
tjungblut 18 days ago [-]
Get a flipper, you can simply download and emulate all of them
joezydeco 18 days ago [-]
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.
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 19 days ago [-]
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.
IIRC, thats the video with the talking calculator demo...
xxmarkuski 18 days ago [-]
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.
bhouston 18 days ago [-]
Does this work for the V-Tech Bugsby? or LeapFrog LeapReader?
I was wondering if they are licensing the same technology base.
Suppafly 18 days ago [-]
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 18 days ago [-]
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.
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.
bhouston 16 days ago [-]
Thank you for the detailed reply based on your research!
reid 18 days ago [-]
Looks very similar to Korea’s Saypen! My daughter loves it.
croisillon 18 days ago [-]
it's funny this toy seems to exist only since 2010, i used to have something very similar around 1991, 1992
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
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
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).
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.
At least that was the case 2-3 years ago.
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...
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.
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.
[1] https://www.playmobil.com/en-us/content/junior_themepage/jun...
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischertechnik
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 Hörbert 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 Hörbert 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 Hörbert, all that involved was ejecting the SDK card and amending its contents on a normal computer.
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).
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_ha...
I might build this with my children together.
Also what helps: resale value is great, so after the Tonies have had their time and your kids become older... just sell them off.
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...
I had a Questron pen as a child and loved it, also made by Ravensburger.
IIRC, thats the video with the talking calculator demo...
I was wondering if they are licensing the same technology base.
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.