A few weeks before christmas we discovered a nice little audio player in a wooden case that is usable for little children [1]. But after reading that it is at 250€ we declined from buying it. Instead we thought about building one by ourselves. This piece was also available as just the PCB for 150€ which is also a little expensive. After searching the net for a while I found a nice do-it-yourself version by Christoph [2]. This one was built with an Arduino and a MP3-shield by Adafruit and therefore predestinated for building a copy.
So I ordered a set of Arduino and a MP3-shield as well as some chunk of electronical components. I also built the wooden case myself a little equal to the original but with a little less design. And in order to get around any possible trouble I call it HackBert. While the wooden case was glueing in the basement I redesigned the source code for the Arduino board a little. The “Forward” button produced strange audio and so I disabled it first of all. I also adapted the adjustable volume range a little. The changes can be seen in my GitHub repo as I uploaded the code there [3].
The code is still under construction as I have some plans what else needs to be changed. But as christmas arrived soon this year we first gave the box to the kids and I will update the code in some nightly hack the other day :)
Some images taken during construction:
References
[1] https://en.hoerbert.com/
[2] http://chrigas.blogspot.de/p/arduino_13.html
[3] https://github.com/phl0/HackBert