alt Hacker NewsFloppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
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> A remote control should be portable, and this means battery-powered.
I don't know, I would have just have the kid get off their seat in between shows and walk up to the TV with drive attached and change disks there. Very similar to how you had to change VHS tapes.
Unless, of course, the above was just an excuse to do some tinkering, then it's fine and fun.
There are some off-the-shelf products that work similarly in the audio space:
I had plans to build something that for the TV, but having kids means I never had the time. And honestly, that might not have been such a bad thing since it made setting limits easier. I was able to teach my kid to turn the TV off when she was fairly young (and pause more recently), which seems to be enough.
My 3 year old watched TV for the first time for 2 minutes in her life (it was hard hiding it from her in an airplane on an overhead screen) and I can tell that TV is generally bad for kids at that age.
"I wanted to build something for my 3-year old son that he could understand and use independently"
As a father I can't imagine ever leaving a 3-year-old alone with media so they can be 'independent'. If for no other reason, that's an age and developmental stage where media should be almost nonexistent in their lives.
I love this! I really wanted to go down this road when my kids were younger, but the paucity of floppys and the low storage space made me go down the Avery business card print outs with RFID stickers on the back and a raspberry pi with an RFID reader inside. Of course, the author is using the floppys as hooks instead of as storage media...what a great idea. The tactile response and the art you can stick to them makes them ideal for this purpose.
This is fantastic! I feel like it's right at the sweet spot where "comically overengineered fun project" and "actually a great idea" overlap.
> There is a pin 34 “Disk Change” that is supposed to give this information, but this is basically a lie. None of the drives in my possession had that pin connected to anything, and the internet mostly concurs. In the end I slightly modified the drive and added a simple rolling switch, that would engage when a disk was inserted.
I wonder if he could have just polled the drive every five seconds?
An easy at home setup is Raspberry Pi running Batocera and Zaparoo with NFC cards. If you buy a three ring binder you can neatly organize the NFC cards.
Bonus: it is an arts and crafts project to put on the stickers for the cards.
There’s a product with a similar UX for audio books called a Yoto Box https://us.yotoplay.com/ It’s very popular in Charlotte Mason homeschool circles
Floppy disks are getting hard to come by, and will soon be too expensive.
A good option would be to have the same data printed as QR codes in labels glued to small domino sized wood blocks that could be inserted in a slot in a box and read by a cheap camera module.
I loved the tactile feel of 3.5" floppies (especially coming from the - actually floppy - 5.25"s). Great choice. In particular, the spring-loaded metal shield was very satisfying to play with, unfortunately those are missing on the disks in the picture (apart from one, which seems to not have the closing spring)! Possibly a casualty to the three year old user.
An easy way to do this is to get an inexpensive DVD / BluRay player and disks. My (expensive) BluRay player will turn the TV on and select itself via HDMI.
I've been thinking of making something similar for my kodi setup for a while, possibly with NFC "disks", or SD card "cartridges", similar to this https://youtu.be/END_PVp3Eds, but I didn't think about using floppies. If I can get my hands on some, that could make a nice "physical library" too. Also a good tip about the arduino floppy drive library, I'll probably make use of that to debug my floppy drive to see if it's the problem or some configuration in my computer that isn't working
This reminds me of a card swiping video game system I made years ago.
My man just built a Yoto from scratch
works fine, though my kids tended to toss it around.
fairly easy to get blanks and record an mp3 on there. got a few of grandma reading favorite books, which my daughter loved.
Responding to the title: Made me think of Star Trek TOS food synthesizers (the precursor to replicators). They used floppy-disk-like cards as their main interface: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Food_synthesizer?file=F...
In particular what brought it to mind was a scene in one episode with a bunch of kids being shown how it works, same episode as the page's title image.
I love these ideas. Another great implementation I've seen on here is someone using NFC/RFID chips to do something similar.
For my toddler, I've started the process of hooking up my TV with a Mac Mini, Broadlink RF dongle, and a Stream Deck. I'm using a python library to control the stream deck.
I'm configuring the buttons to play her favorite shows with jellyfin. End goal is to create a jukebox for her favorite shows/movies/music. Only thing I have it wired to do right now is play fart noises.
Why not just burn DVDs with whatever content one wants to fetch and re-encode to SD MPEG2? It's not like kids are super critical about picture quality anyway.
We have a similar product in Italy: https://www.myfaba.it/
Cool idea!
Is the terminology correct though?
Looking at the showcased disks, in my youth we called these “stiffy disks” - owing to their stiff plastic casing.
We also had “floppy disks” - but these were larger (in size, albeit with less storage capacity) and floppier (the plastic case would bend easily).
I treasured my burgundy Dysan stiffy disk boxes!
Reminds me of a project on here a while ago where the author had used NFC tags and home assistant to give his kids a digital library with little tap cards.
I made a similar Project, where i embed a NFC Tag Label and use a NFC Reader to trigger the launch of Games on Batocera, using Zaparoo as Daemon.
The kids love it and it's easy to use
I love these physical mechanisms for controlling the software that surrounds us. Not enough physical UX out there; all the industrial designers seem to be in love with single button controls or touchscreens or capacitive panels. I presume they're cheaper than switches with a nice thunk or dials with a nice clicky feel.
Unfortunately, it takes a fair bit of time and skill with microelectronics and fabrication to build these things.
My 7 year old has figured out the Roku app pretty well and can play stuff on PBS Kids or turn on the Nintendo Switch without any guidance. His 3 year old brother, not so much.
Cool project! There was something quite similar but with RFID cards showed on HN a few months ago:
https://simplyexplained.com/blog/how-i-built-an-nfc-movie-li...
I was reading this and thinking about StarTrek the original series, computer disks were just solid blocks or the 1970s FisherPrice record player.
Both really tactile and if you don’t look after them then there is a cost/consequence
Kinda cool, I was thinking about building a similar system, but based on NFC tags to load specific movies from my Plex server.
At least those are easier to acquire, and they can't get demagnetized :)
I though my laptop monitor is broken for a second due to the dirty css background on this page.
Website seems to be getting the HN Hug right now. Alt link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260112142332/https://blog.smar...
For nogstalgia's sake you can also a really old HDD and do some seeks (without doing anything of course) and make the HDD Led (installed on old drives) blink and make old school coffee machine sounds. This would make waiting even more "something is going to happen! ... I know it! ... just waiting to load ...".
Reminds me of HitClips from the early 2000s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitClips
I remember being quite entranced with one that a neighbor had. It feels like a bit of a silly format now, but perhaps it's time for a resurgence.
> Who hasn’t turned in a paper on a broken floppy disk, with the excuse ready that the floppy must have broken when the teacher asks a few days later?
I feel seen
Tangible, persistent interfaces are great. XR interfaces usually only scratch the surface.
Maybe we'll eventually get an AR os where you get to lean spatial reasoning instead of just floating screens. (Along side all the power tools, of course)
I love the idea of associating certain programs / games / whatever with a physical object. All kinds of neat downstream behavioural levers and consequences.
This is such a cool idea. I will definitely build one for my daughter, and then I can finally get rid of the old floppy disks and use them in a useful way.
Man, this really smacks of OG Star Trek when Mr. Spock would pop in one of his little plastic data cards to run an application or load data ... I love it!
It almost feels like a Yoto player: https://us.yotoplay.com/
I am not sure physical component will help that much. Not after I once saw a kid swap between 4 different Minions DVDs every 5-10 minutes.
Wow, I think this is the first one of these "floppies for kids" things I've seen that actually stores something on the disk.
This seems a great idea conceptually, but in practice, from mine one sample data, its ways to limiting and simple for a toddler.
My child just turned 3, she can already turn on the NVIDIA Shield, go into Jellyfin and put a movie playing.
The movie is always Shrek or Jungle Book though, so I still didn’t have to put parental restrictions. But she can already choose them from the favorites list.
This is a great idea. If it was on Etsy I would get one for my friends that have toddlers.
If the kids ever come across a traditional Save icon, they will be confused. ;)
That's super cool!
I built an app for managing a similar project based on something else linked here previously: https://github.com/Chuntttttt/TapeDeck/
I self-host it and it isn't exposed outside of my network, not sure if it'll work for anyone else.
I found an unopened pack of 3.5" floppies the other day
They must be _over_ 20 years old
Physical media and/or interactions are a great way to help kids understand storage as a physical media and putting into and out of things.
One thing I notice with kids is they think everything is already in a device, which is not true at all, same for the internet always being available.
I see DVDs etc coming back into popularity for kids now too, because they can control and make it play, instead of fighting a youtube algorithm that is obesses with getting them to play the next video. Streaming platforms are the same and they will be leaving my life if I can't manage how they are to be used.
That combined with Youtube not allowing me to add youtube kids videos to a playlist however I wish (premium account or not) has me looking elsewhere.
A few rfid stickers would have been easier :)
Does it play exactly one video?
A much simpler remedy is to plug a computer into the TV, then program the computer to show the desired / appropriate content. This would be much simpler than trying to design a remote control meant to circumvent a TV manufacturer's extreme dedication to removing a consumer's control over their TV.
This remedy only requires a Raspberry Pi and an HDMI cable. Also, disconnect the TV from the Internet.
What a great idea, good job.
The floppy disk insertion detection could take a cue from AmigaOS and try to read a track to see if it gets anything. But not sure if that would work without changing the floppy driver...
> Modern TVs are very poorly suited for kids. They require using complicated remotes or mobile phones, and navigating apps that continually try to lure you into watching something else than you intended to.
I'd argue that's not too different for grown-ups. ;)