Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
(blog.smartere.dk)691 points by mchro a day ago
691 points by mchro a day ago
Someone else posting to HN used cheap flash cartridges for a "music player" like this. There is something to be said about having a ROM or ROM-like media that can store even a few megabytes of data rather than QR codes being relatively bandwidth limited and so often needing a URL to data or more URLs.
The article points out there is a useful lesson in accidentally destroying/losing a physical object in the way that floppies or VHS tapes were easy to accidentally destroy and taught young childhood lessons. QR codes are a bit harder to destroy, which can be a benefit, but also loses this tiny lesson.
They are currently $1 per disk, are reusable, and last a very long time.
It is likely they are still being manufactured, too.
Even if the price were to double, I suspect that someone with the skills to make this has a sufficiently well paying job that the price of a hundred disks per year would not be a problem.
I think so! As far as I can google, it seems like everything available is new-old-stock or recovered discs.
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-s...
Interesting little read I fell into while looking this up!
You could wire in one of those small phone vibration motors and get similar noises out of it. Experimenting with different ways of mounting the motor so that it makes metallic or mechanical noises would be fun. If you really wanted to get the full audio experience you could also add another motor that spins a small, disk shaped load that you could ramp up and down for the steady whirring noises.
It is fascinating to think that after we moved everything online, we keep finding uses for physical media that needs to be read by a player.
Yes, it is not efficient, but physical media looks to like it kind of meet some higher levels of needs in the Maslow hierarchy. It is ergonomic, it is human, it is tangible, countable. It is embodied in a world that is less and less embodied by the day.
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.
I find it quite a nice feeling to put a CD into CD player. That's something my kids were deprived of, but I'm trying to re-teach them.
I would say that feeling that we have everything at the tip of our fingers does not make our brains value it for some reason, but I'm not sure if it's true, and can't support it with any arguments others than anecdotical.
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.
This is a fun setup, I have a child due in March and have been thinking through all the things to help make things not instant for learning patience as well. While I may still to DVDs for viewing, as I kept my collection building. I do have a floppy drive available and like this idea.
For those talking about not using TV much, or that the UI is slow, my setup is a cheap projector hooked into my sound system and hooking up a laptop when streaming as necessary. Really dislike the smart anything that can be used in other ways for the reasons I already saw mentioned, but it is hard to lag something that has no Internet by looking for ads and updates for sure.
Generally it is better not to show kids those cartoons. I have 3 kids already and trust me: Stick and some piece of thread is much better. 3 hours of watching anything for the entire week is more than enough.
> 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.
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
For people looking at OSS, Phoniebox seems to be the popular/mature project: https://phoniebox.de/index-en.html
(My partner and I are building one for our daughter)
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.
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.
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...
Which can be a useful lesson sometimes (as the article mentions teaching that lesson with accidentally destroyed floppies). With burning one's own DVDs you potentially balance that fragility with easy replacement (just burn another copy).
This reminds me of a card swiping video game system I made years ago.
We have a similar product in Italy: https://www.myfaba.it/
In the US there's Yoto Players that use RFID cards and onboard flash memory: https://us.yotoplay.com/
And Tonies with little figures and games and such: https://us.tonies.com/
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.
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.
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!
I was under the impression that a floppy disk is referring to the substrate that holds the data, not the cartridge that contains it. So a 3.5" floppy disk would be "floppy" in contrast to a 3.5" hard disk drive that has rigid metal or glass platters.
This nomenclature could be a regional thing though (I'm from the US).
> I have never heard that term
Are you also from the US like the other commenter on this sub-thread?
Italian here, and I never heard of the term either. Everybody always used the term floppy also for the 3.5 disks
I guess that since it was a foreign word the physical connotation of the term was simply lost, and "a floppy" was just the disk that your computer used.
thanks, that's an insightful comment.
so defs not a globally consistent usage of the term then?
judging by the article's authorship, i'm guessing denmark and US the same
so perhaps US and EU but not elsewhere?
i feel like you're onto something here...
a marketing campaign for middle-aged men perhaps
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 ...".
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.
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.
I found an unopened pack of 3.5" floppies the other day
They must be _over_ 20 years old
I am estimating when this particular package of disks was purchased based on additional information I am not sharing, not how long floppy disks in general have remained available for purchase
A few rfid stickers would have been easier :)
Does it play exactly one video?
hehe yes, but you can have both I thought. Let the drive do its thing but don't rely on it for the actual ID.
It's of course not the nice way to do it, but the easy one I thiiink.
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 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.
That only works if the kid has not seen it working normally before.
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.
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.
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...
Also, have the TV display an image like this before: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Kickstar...
My 3 year old learned how to use the remote and watched by himself. We just instructed him not to watch silly stuff and he learned which show teaches him something and discovered numberblocks and alphablocks by himself on youtubekids. My other son just can't comprehend how to use the remote and learned it when he's already 4.5 years old. The main method they use for discovery is the speech search.
yep, my 3 year old gets a very limited amount of screen time and he only watches educational programs (not whatever cartoons his peers watch). There's is no way I want to make it _easier_ for him to watch TV, especially as he has very little interest in it already.
Looking back in time, the only benefit of watching anything on a screen as a kid is learning a foreign language. The content is always some form of a brain rot, or political, cultural, or religious propaganda.
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.