This Clever Remote Turns TV Tactile — By Tying Video Playback to Physical Floppy Disks

Maker Mads Chr. Olesen has turned to a classic of tactile media to solve the usability issue of modern "smart" TV sets: the good old floppy diskette.

"Modern TVs are very poorly suited for kids," Olesen explains of the problem his project is designed to solve. "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. The usual scenario ends up with the kid feeling disempowered and asking an adult to put something on. That something ends up on auto-play because then the adult is free to do other things and the kid ends up stranded powerless and comatose in front of the TV. Instead I wanted to build something for my 3-year old son that he could understand and use independently."

While one solution to the problem is the use of a programmable remote that can perform multiple steps at the push of a single button, Olesen wanted something more tangible — and, interestingly, which put a stronger focus on the content being a physical thing. "it should be something he could touch and feel," the maker explains. "It should also have some illusion that the actual media content was stored physically and not un-understandably in 'the cloud,' meaning it should e.g. be destroyable —if you break the media there should be consequences. And there should be no auto-play: interact once and get one video."

The solution: the humble 3.5" floppy diskette, a now-rare example of physical magnetic media used for data storage before near-ubiquitous high-speed connectivity moved everything server-side and streamed-on-demand. As you might expect, the disks — holding up to 2.88MB of raw data, depending on how you format it, or up to 32MB if you permit the use of more esoteric readers like the LS-120 SuperDisk — aren't big enough to store the actual video files themselves, but are big enough to hold a simple shell script which triggers programmatic control of a Google Chromecast dongle.

Unlike similar project we've seen in the past, Olesen's creation does required data to be stored on the disk — and uses a real floppy drive to read it, albeit with a minor hardware modification to notify an Arduino-based microcontroller when a new disk has been inserted. A battery safely ensconced inside a laser-cut wooden housing finishes the build and allows for fully-wireless operation.

The full project write-up is available on Olesen's blog.