Boxine reinvented the Childrens Audio Player Market by establishing an alternative control for kids besides of handling old cassettes or CDs in September 2016. Since then several other players tried to jump onto the train and came up with either their own development to improve the kids access to audio content or just came up with a more or less copied process where the music is not controlled by a figurine but with a card or a chip / round token.
TechniSat, well known for several electronics like Radios, TVs or satellite dishes, just started to sell their own interpretation of a kids audio player. The TECHNIFANT.
They did not use any figurines or NFC cards for the content control. They choose a hat shaped device which can be placed / plugged on top of the elephant shaped audio player. But this time it is not just equipped with an NFC / RFID Tag but is more on the page of an cassette or CD where the audio is actually stored within this medium.
The hat itself contains a storage of 2 GB where the audio is stored. This means that there is no need for a WIFI connection which lets the audio player download the content from the internet.
The hat can either be filled with content distributed from the TechiSat Shop itself or can be filled with your own mp3 files. Therefor the hat can be connect to a computer via an USB cable to upload the files.
As of now I was not able to get my hands on a TECHNIFANT. As soon as someone will provide me with a TECHNIFANT to let me experience it on my own, I will write a detailed post about it.
But until then I will celebrate the tear down pictures one of the Team RevvoX community members send me over.
Have fun with this Teardown…
Besides the blue audio player a stand which has a power plug build in and an USB cable to plug the hat, which is used as audio content storage, to the computer, a green audio hat is included within the packaging.
The player itself comes in a shape of an elephant (kind of). On the front side of the player five colorful buttons and a hole grid for the speaker are placed.
On the backside a label with some technical descriptions and six screws are located. The screws are covered by a little blue plugs to maintain a nicer surface.
The screws can be extracted with a T6H Torx bit.
The battery is placed in a battery compartment within the back lid.
The build in battery is a 3,7 Volt lithium ion battery cell in a well known format like it is used in cellphones.
The remaining housing has an outer semilucent frame that lets the whole TECHNIFANT glow in the dark when it is used as a night stand.
The PCB itself is connected with the same kind of screws like the housing and therefore can be unscrewed with the T6H Torx Bit.
Between the PCB and the front lid of the housing there is a speaker and the five button caps installed. The speaker itself is connected with a JST connector to the PCB
some close ups of the PCB
front side of the PCB
back side of the PCB
Detailed view on the Buttons and the hat connector.
Right beneath the hat connector some treacherous connection points on the PCB can be found. These are obviously for an vertical mount micro USB connector.
This one from Aliexpress would probably work. To have this detail within the PCB could hint to a regular USB storage device that is build into the hat. This would explain the easy access to the hat storage with a USB cable. With this connector installed it could be that regular USB drives could be used as a hat replacement.
The TEHCNIFANT is based on an ARM STM32F730 Chip.
Although up to now neither the feature list of the TECHNIFANT nor the manual states anything about build in Bluetooth there is obviously a BM20SPKS1NBC from MICROCHIP TECHNOLOGY installed on the PCB. This could be used in future firmware updates e.g. for Bluetooth enabled headphones.
That’s for now. This device looks kind of interesting because of the ARM structure and the USB storage connection. Guess that we (Team RevvoX) will have some fun to play with it. If you like you can follow us on telegram and be part of the experience we will have with this device.
https://t.me/TECHNIFANT_reverse_engineering