Once upon a late night in late 2016, I stumbled upon a "children's learning notebook" by a German board game company Ravensburger. For only a few Euros I gave in to my curiosity and just bought it. Maybe as a fancy Raspberry Pi notebook case using its original components (screen, keyboard)? I had a lot of ideas.

It arrived, I switched it on and was happily greeted by a friendly female voice (nice text to speech), inviting me to commence in a round of math quizzes. Cute! I played some rounds, tried out most of the integrated programs, when I suddenly stumbled upon something quite geeky: Productivity programs! There seems to be more to that device than just plain learning games!

The fact that it comes with an integrated word processor, which has a menu item called PC-Link intrigued me - Could I connect it to another computer? An Arduino? A Raspberry Pi? ESP8266? Well, I did not find any information about the "PC-Link" feature on the internet. I even contacted the company's support directly. And they scanned the original manual and sent it to me as a PDF! Thank you, Ravensburger support!

But no matter how hard I asked/searched, there seems to be no cable or software available these days. The computer uses a standard 6-pin Mini DIN jack to connect to a printer. I searched eBay and bought it. Then I  shoved some wires into the DIN-port and connected an Arduino between the notebook and the printer. Then I started the word processor, wrote some words and selected "Print" from the menu and watched asthe bits flew between the computer and the printer... I quickly saw that it looked like some kind of SPI protocol. That was fun!

So this showed me that data transmission is physically possible, and there is some level of hackability to these devices. But what about running own code? I could not find any cartridges (yes, it has a cartridge port) so there is no way of finding ROM dumps to play with. So I first stopped there.

But wait! There are so many other "learning notebooks" out there! Off to eBay!!!

(to be continued)