from Hacker News

Reverse engineering the Ravensburger TipToi pen

by cl3misch on 12/2/24, 10:06 AM with 46 comments

• by unwind on 12/6/24, 9:14 AM

  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

• by niemandhier on 12/6/24, 9:47 AM

  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.

• by globalise83 on 12/6/24, 9:31 AM

  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.

• by rob74 on 12/6/24, 9:20 AM

  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...

• by amaurose on 12/6/24, 5:48 PM

  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...

• by xxmarkuski on 12/6/24, 3:22 PM

  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.

• by bhouston on 12/6/24, 1:21 PM

  Does this work for the V-Tech Bugsby? or LeapFrog LeapReader?

  I was wondering if they are licensing the same technology base.

• by reid on 12/6/24, 11:56 AM

  Looks very similar to Korea’s Saypen! My daughter loves it.

• by croisillon on 12/6/24, 11:39 AM

  it's funny this toy seems to exist only since 2010, i used to have something very similar around 1991, 1992

• by Suppafly on 12/6/24, 4:54 PM

  The puzzle company?