ScottTV - a Simple Media Player for My Autistic Son

Hi all,

I want to show you this media player for my son Scott.

He has autism, so the challenge was to make it simple, robust and easy to clean.

I could not find a commercial solution, so I build this device with 6 Big Buttons. The media menu shows a preview of 6 cartoons. If the button next to the preview is pushed, this movie is played. Now all the buttons are offline for 5sec.

If you push any of the 6 buttons, the movie stops and the player jumps back to the main menu.

It's based on a raspberry pi B+

Videolink

Step 1: Woodworking

1x 800mm x 1250mm 18mm multiplex plate

2x 80mm x 1250mm 18mm

4x 80mm x 764mm 18mm

1x wood strip +- 1600mm 10mm x 10mm

2x wall rail for the monitor vesa support

Cutting a hmn ole in the wood plate. I took the dimensions of the LCD screen and I added 1cm on each side. Drilling 48mm holes for the buttons and test if everything fits.

Fill all the irregularities with wood paste

On the bottom 2 cut outs for the foot bar

Step 2: Paint Job

After sanding the whole thing, I sprayed a few layers of gray ground paint.

All painted with red paint. I used a small projector to put an Image of Shin Chan on the front. Then I drew the picture and colored it with Acryl colors.

Now 2 layers of transparent protector paint

Step 3: Tech Inside

6x PiezoButtons from my other instructables : https://www.instructables.com/id/Robust-Big-Piezo-Button/

1x 20 inch monitor

1x USB speakers

1x RaspberryPi B+ 700Mhz with 16Gb Sd and 16Gb Usb stick

1x 5V 4A Power supply

Take apart cheap USB powered Speakers, so you will get an amplifier and 2 Speakers and all the wiring you need.

I build an adaptor circuit to connect the 5V buttons to the 3,3V Gpio's of the raspberry. The buttons are connected each to an transistor. The transistor pulls the gpio down to GND.

All inputs are connected over diodes to a buzzer so each time you push a button you have a feedback.

For the power, I used an old 5V 4A power supply. I cut an OGT cable in 2 parts and connected them to the power supply. The micro USB is for the raspberry and the USB port is for the speakers.

All the cables are hot glued in the box

The Speakers are mounted inside, so they can not be destroyed. I drilled 2 holes in the wooden board so that the sound will go downside.

Step 4: Raspberry Pi Software

You need Python with RPi.GPIO plugin

I use arch Linux as operating system. It's lightweight and just console based.

To playback the videos in the console in overlay mode, I use the omxplayer.

The main-menu is just a one minute looped Video created in Sony Vegas and Gimp for the still images.

The software is written in Python3.x. Then main program "scotttv.py" is starting the menu.m4 and then checks if a button is pushed. If you push a button it stops the menu.mp4 and calls "callvid.py" Here the selected movie (01.mp4 - 06.mp4) is started. When you push now a button, the movie stops and returns to the script "scotttv.py". When no button is pushed and the movie comes to his end, it returns to "scotttv.py" to.

In here the movie menu.mp4 is started again.

My two scrips are here https://github.com/awall9999/scotttv

Don't judge too hard, because my main programming language is google.com :)