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If you have or have ever had an 18 month old child (and older) one thing you find is that they like buttons. Mine do anyway. They like to push them. Remote control buttons, computer CD-ROM eject buttons, elevator buttons, alarm clock buttons.. you get the idea. The most annoying, however is the TV power button. The annoyance comes in two forms. First, of course when your watching TV and the child likes to turn the TV on and off. Second, when you’re not watching TV. The older child convinces the younger to turn the TV on so that she has plausible deniability to claim “I didn’t do it.”

So, being the electrical engineer, I take the classical approach of how it would be cool to install a tiny disable switch on the side of the TV. The kids wouldn’t be able to reach or find it, yet could still be used by an adult on the rare occasion the remote is MIA. Then, as usual, reality sets in and I realize I would never have time to install even such a simple device and life goes on.

So, I come home from work on day, and I find my wife has found an ingenious non-technical solution to our little “problem.” See photo below. The solution came in the form of a $0.50 3 x 5 plexiglass photo stand. Sliding the base under the TV and the face over the buttons keeps the little fingers away, but still allows the IR from the remote to hit the sensor. Problem solved.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 10:18 pm and is filed under Life with Kids, General, Electronics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.