Developer turns old floppy drive into media remote for son • The Register
Smart TV UIs are hard enough for adults to navigate, let alone preschoolers. When his three-year-old couldn’t learn to navigate with a remote, one Danish computer scientist did what any enterprising creator would do: He turned an old floppy disk drive into a kid-friendly content controller that starts streams based on what disk you insert.
As Mads Olesen explained in a blog post, his son usually winds up asking him to handle the television, leaving him disempowered and unable to make content choices for himself. If dad doesn’t spend a lot of time with the remote, unwanted autoplay ensures his son inevitably “ends up stranded powerless and comatose in front of the TV.”
Faced with that dilemma, Olesen turned to the ancient storage medium of 3.5-inch floppy disks to give his son a tactile, simple way to control his own viewing.
“Floppy disks are the best storage media ever invented,” Olesen opined. “Why else would the ‘save-icon’ still be a floppy disk?”
A prior project delivering episodes of his child’s earlier favorite TV show (Fantus, in case our Scandinavian readers are curious), which relied on a single big red button, served as the engineering basis for his new floppy disk remote player. Like the single-button Fantus player, the floppy disk player served as a physical way for Olesen’s son to access content hosted online, as it’s hard to fit much modern digital content on a 1.44 MB disk, after all.
A selection of floppy disks Olesen created for his son’s media player – Click to enlarge
Of course, relying on multiple floppy disks with one show or type of media (there are also disks that stream playlists of Olesen’s and his wife’s favorite kid-appropriate music videos) per disk meant some additional coding had to be done. Still, the system remains pretty simple.
“The disk just has a very short string in a file (‘autoexec.sh’), basically saying which bash-script to run on the server, e.g. ‘dad-music’ would be one disk,” Olesen explained in a conversation with The Register. “The server is just a Raspberry Pi with a bunch of these scripts, and pychromecast for controlling the Chromecast from Python.”
“At this point, I think we have about 8 or 9 different disks,” Olesen added. “It is relatively easy to make new disks; the main hurdle for me is printing the labels.”
As far as controls go, inserting a floppy disk of his son’s choice starts the content streaming, popping a disk out pauses it, and reinserting starts the playback again, emulating “the illusion as much as possible that it is the disk that is playing.”
With the disk drive designed to automatically stream content to a television when a disk is inserted, and floppies not exactly famous for their autoplay, Olesen had another hurdle to jump.
“While, in theory, floppy disks are supported for AutoRun, it turns out that floppy drives basically don’t know if a disk is inserted until the operating system tries to access it,” Olesen wrote. He noted that 34-pin headers for many old floppy drives had a “disk change” pin on the 34th position, but none of his drives had that feature.
“In the end I slightly modified the drive and added a simple rolling switch that would engage when a disk was inserted,” Olesen explained.
The switch, an Arduino designed to transmit code wirelessly to the Raspberry Pi server, and a whole bunch of batteries that provide wireless power, combine to form a device that Olesen told us months after handing it over to his kid, is still a favorite device.
“My kid is still using it,” Olesen told us. “Obviously, the TV shows he watches have changed a bit, but he does enjoy dancing to the music, and the fact that he has his own floppy disk.”
The one thing Olesen said he’d do differently, were he to redesign the entire project, would be to eliminate the Chromecast due to excessive latency and connect a computer directly to the TV. That, and he wishes he would have programmed a different melody onto each disk that would play from the drive itself when a disk was inserted, which he told us “should be totally doable” if he ever gets around to it.
If you, too, long for the era when a satisfying ca-chunk preceded file transfers and want to find something useful to do with that old floppy disk drive rotting away in that box of old computer stuff, Olesen’s entire codebase and other relevant project files are available on GitHub. ®
