Make your own cards for a Yoto player from cheap blank NFC cards. You need one genuine Make Your Own card from Yoto, a phone with NFC, and a pack of the right blanks.
Yoto's own Make Your Own card. You only need one, and you relink it for every new card.
MIFARE Ultralight EV1, 48 byte. A pack of 10 is about £7 on Amazon; 100 cost about 27p each from a UK card supplier.
Any cheap full-sheet A4 sticker paper. Each sheet makes 10 card labels, so a 100-sheet pack lasts for 1,000 cards.
In the Yoto app, open Library → Playlists, pick a playlist, tap Link to a card → Use your phone and tap your genuine MYO card. That card now carries the playlist's link. You can relink the same MYO card to a new playlist every time you make another card.
Press the button first, then hold the MYO card flat against the back of your phone. If the Yoto app opens instead, the page wasn't listening yet: come back and press the button before tapping the card.
The link appears here once the MYO card is read.
Tap the button, then hold a blank MIFARE Ultralight EV1 card against your phone until it says done.
This writes the card's NDEF header. It can't be undone, but it only needs doing once per card.
Every link you read is saved here, on this phone only. To rewrite a lost or damaged card, write it again from this list without relinking the MYO card.
Apple doesn't let web pages use NFC, so on an iPhone the free NFC Tools app does the reading and writing. These steps also work on Android if the copy button above doesn't. Hold cards at the top edge of an iPhone.
Yoto app → Library → Playlists → your playlist → Link to a card → Use your phone → tap the MYO card.
NFC Tools → Other → Advanced NFC commands, tap I understand. Paste this into the Data field, tap Send command, then tap the blank card.
Each A2 block is the Ultralight WRITE command for one 4-byte page. Page 3 (E1 10 06 00) marks the card as NDEF version 1.0 with 6 × 8 = 48 bytes of space, readable and writable. Pages 4 and 5 write an empty message and an end marker. Page 3 is one-time-programmable, so the prep is permanent, and a card that has had it can still be rewritten with new links any number of times.
NFC Tools → Write → More options → Import from NFC tag → tap the MYO card. The playlist link appears in the list.
Tap Write / 45 Bytes (the number may differ slightly) and tap the prepared blank. If it says the card is too small, the link is longer than the 45 bytes a 48-byte card can hold.
Put the new card in the player. To make the next card, relink the MYO card to another playlist and repeat steps 3 and 4.
Cut one long recording into shorter tracks, which are easier to upload and to skip through on the player. It all happens on this device: the file is never uploaded.
In the Yoto app, add all the parts to one playlist as separate tracks, so the whole recording plays from one card. Then make that card's label on the Labels tab.
Split your own recordings, audio you've bought as a file, or public-domain audiobooks such as those from LibriVox.
One sticker per card, at exact card size (85.6 × 54 mm, with the card's rounded corners), ten to an A4 sheet. Download the PDF, print it at 100% on full-sheet sticker paper, then cut along the grey lines. Which sticker paper?
Pick several pictures at once to get one card each, named after the files. Pictures are scaled and cropped to fill the card. Ten cards fit on each A4 sheet.
Designing in Canva, Word or Photoshop instead? The blank template shows the cut line, the 1 mm bleed to extend pictures into, and the safe area to keep text inside.
Any cheap full-sheet A4 sticker paper works: one sheet makes 10 card labels. Budget packs are fine; buy the type that matches your printer.
Buy MIFARE Ultralight EV1, 48 byte cards (chip MF0UL11). Listings can be vague, so check the listing says exactly that before you buy.
Small pack: YARONGTECH Ultralight EV1 MF0UL11 48 byte white cards, pack of 10, about £7 on Amazon (sent by Amazon). Reviewers use them for Yoto players.
Bulk: usmartcards' white PVC Ultralight EV1 48 byte card (MF0ULx1), about 27p each plus VAT, minimum order 100.
Amazon listings are often vague. Only buy ones that say Ultralight EV1 and 48 byte (or MF0UL11).
Or, on AliExpress, eBay or another RFID supplier, search for:
MIFARE Ultralight EV1 card 48 byte blank PVCUse cheap full-sheet A4 sticker paper (one big sticker per sheet). The label PDF fits 10 card labels on each sheet, and every one lands on sticker however your printer feeds the page. Budget unbranded packs work fine; just match your printer type. If you want a known brand:
| Inkjet printer | Avery J8167 (A4, 1 per sheet, 199.6 × 289.1 mm) |
| Laser printer | Avery L7167 (same size, made for laser) |
Official MYO cards cost roughly ten times as much per card as bulk EV1 blanks. That makes it practical to give every book, album and bedtime playlist its own card.