“Floppy disks are the best storage media ever invented,” claims tech tinkerer and maker Mads Chr. Olesen. The devoted dad has made it his mission to prove that assertion to his three-year-old son, by making an easy, tactile, Smart TV control system that is fed by these distinctive physical manifestations of the save icon. Say hello to the FloppyDiskCast smart TV remote system for kids.
Modern Smart TV controls are disempowering for toddlers, reckons Olesen. The maker considers the bundled remote control, or using smart device controls, to introduce too much ‘noise’ and distraction to the use of a Smart TV. The tile-based UIs may even cause little ones to develop short attention spans – if they can even successfully navigate the interfaces.
The Smart TV meets toddler problem played on Olesen’s mind, until he decided that kids would benefit from the floppy disk experience of yore. Putting the idea into practice, the first idea of using a floppy shell to enclose an RFID tag was set aside. Olesen wanted the floppy disk remote control device to exhibit the authentic “click, whirrr, brrr brrr,” feedback that veteran users of this portable removable storage media were familiar with.
The maker seems most familiar with retro-Windows ways of loading removable media. That meant “floppy drives basically don’t know if a disk is inserted until the operating system tries to access it.” But those of us who used Apple Macs and Amigas back in the day remember the former’s whirring clicky auto-feed mechanism, and the latter’s constant FDD ticking, ready to sense media, if the slot was empty.
Olesen eventually figured that pin 34 on old floppy drives could relay disk change information. But to get it to work, he needed to make a physical switch to engage when a disk was inserted. When a floppy is detected, the Arduino FDC Floppy library by dhansel comes into play.
Making the insertion of a particular floppy disk fire up the playback of a particular TV show comes down to a short configuration file ‘autoexec.sh’ that Olesen adds to each floppy. Since the disk read bursts are so short, it was feasible to make this floppy disk-driven remote battery-powered, despite the ancient desktop computer tech at its heart.
Different config files reside on different disks, featuring different colors and artwork, and play different shows. It is a highly intuitive Smart TV control method for the toddler. It likely ‘feels’ to the user that the media playing is the disk, but the Arduino code simply fires up the corresponding streams via a Chromecast.
If you are interested in making your own FloppyDiskCast, click this link to head on over to GitHub and get making.
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