Sometimes those moments arise when a new device comes on the market and hardware hackers immediately take to it. Over a few days, an observer can watch them reverse engineer it and have all sorts of fun making it do things it wasn’t intended to by the original manufacturer. We’re watching this happen in real time from afar this morning, as Dutch hackers are snapping up a promotional kids’ game from a supermarket (mixed Dutch/English, the site rejects Google Translate).

The Albert Heijn soundbox is a small handheld device with a barcode reader and a speaker, and as far as we can see it forms part of an animal identification card game. The cards have a barcode on the back, and sliding them through a reader causes a sample of that animal’s sound to be played. They’re attractively cheap, so of course someone had to take a look inside. So far the parts including the microcontroller have been identified, the ROM has been dumped and the audio reverse-engineered, and the barcode format has been cracked. Still to come are the insertion of custom audio or codes and arbitrary code execution, but knowing these hackers that won’t take long. If you’re Dutch, we suggest you head over to your local Albert Heijn with a few euros, and join in the fun.

European supermarkets can be fruitful places for the hardware hacker, as we’ve shown you before.