Linki

The third prototype were made for friend's daughter's birthday. It's smaller and a bit lighter. Also hardware choice of ESP32 for audio playing was made for extended battery life. Software is still in development.

Linkidrive is a device for home use. It should be connected to external amplifier to play music.

It could also be extendable to video if connected to computer and a screen.

The material of plywood is chosen to be easy to build and accessible.

For the second birthday for my daughter I created a new version that would also play sounds samples by touching the metal hooks.  It shows how open ended this project could be. Linkies could be used to change the sounds samples for simple synthesizers etc.

It used Raspberry Pi for sound playing.

Linki project has been ongoing research project since 2016. I wanted to create a physical audio player for my daughter's first birthday that would not have a screen and be fun for her. It turned out so well that I wanted similar player for my own favorite internet radio streams (at WFMU radio station). In the beginning I used old floppies to hide NFC tags and write or draw on them. Floppies are great as the physical size is small enough to be portable and big enough to fit an artwork. Later I understood that it could be made of anything and the plywood and cardboard linkies were made.

This project is about home-grown playful media format that could use the powers of the internet. It could be used for also making new content.

It used Adafruit sound trigger board and Arduino for sound playing.