Having a child with autism isn’t easy. Alain Mauer’s son, Scott, can’t make eye contact and doesn’t talk. He also requires constant supervision.
“Communication with Scott is very difficult,” says Alain. “He understands us, but can’t tell us what he wants. You can’t leave him alone for a single second.
The full article can be found in The MagPi 46 and was written by Lucy Hattersley
“But from time to time he has to stay in his room,” adds Alain. The answer was to make Scott’s bedroom “Scottcompatible! You can lock everything from the wardrobe to the window, and we’ve installed a camera in the wardrobe too.”
But this isn’t much fun for Scott. He doesn’t like staying alone in his room and finds it boring. “He doesn’t play with toys or use his imagination to play. But we know that he likes cartoons with music,” reveals Alain.
“Scott had a 32-inch TV in his room because he loves to watch cartoons, but one day he destroyed it. So we tried another one with a Plexiglass sheet in front of it, but he tried to destroy it too.”
Alain started to wonder if the problem wasn’t the television, but what was playing. “He has no ability to tell us, or to stop it, on his own,” explains Alain. “So he gets frustrated, and tapping against the noisy thing is his only way of stopping it.”
The answer was to build a television that was Scott-proof, and the result is Scott TV: an unbreakable television with the screen hidden inside. Six large, easily bashable buttons start and stop cartoons playing. A Raspberry Pi – tucked safely inside the wooden case – powers the whole project.
Built out of 18mm multiplex wood, the Scott TV case houses the television, but it still needs protection. A sheet of 8mm Plexiglass in front of the display is the solution. “It wasn’t complicated to build,” says Alain. “With a jigsaw, a drill machine, and a little table saw, all is possible.
“The Raspberry Pi is the main part of the project. Normally, I tell everybody that the Pi is optimised for controlling stuff and not as a media player. But I was wrong: it plays full HD videos.”
The Scott TV has six large buttons, handbuilt by Alain with piezo switches on the inside. “The buttons were the challenge,” says Alain, “but you can use any kind of buttons.”
The menu displays previews from six cartoons (one next to each button). If Scott pushes a button, the cartoon starts playing. If he pushes any button when a movie is playing, it returns to the menu screen.
“I used NOOBS to install Arch Linux. For [a] console-based media player, I used Omxplayer. I then used Python 3.5 to write the scripts. I’m not a Linux expert or a programmer, so Google was my friend. The scripts are available on GitHub.
“Since it was set up in his room, Scott likes to stay longer and push the buttons,” Alain tells us. “Sometimes he sits in front of the media player and just looks at the animated menu, or he plays the Twinkle Twinkle Little Star video ten times and laughs. To see him so happy was the biggest thank you from him to me.”
