Electrical baby toys are interesting to disassemble and look at how it’s made. Not up to the point of screwing out the PCB, decapping the chips and trying to reverse-engineer the ROM, but just on a basic mechanical level. Companies like VTech and Clementoni apply simple but clever techniques for their systems to provide just enough variation while keeping the production costs low. braindump takes a look at such toys and how if there is an electronic error, how it’s handled.
Consider the Baby Clementoni puzzle farmer themed laying board game…would pressing (a) combination of switches crash the whole thing? Nope! Clementoni’s engineers were smart enough to “catch” that error: triggering one of the unknown states by forcing a combination with your fingers emits a bloop followed by a voice saying “uh-oh!”.
So what happens when you press an unknown combination of buttons on VTech toys? Unfortunately, nothing. What a letdown and missed opportunity! Instead of putting in an easter egg like the Clementoni puzzle board, the VTech Zoef Zoef animals, Toet Toet cars, steam train blocks, and wobbly water fun figurines all go silent.
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