When Calvin goes into his bedroom during the day, nothing good can come of it (I’ll go into more detail about this in the next week). And so we have a physical child lock on the outside of his door so that he can’t go in until it’s time for bed.
Yesterday, I moved a second Nest camera into his room so that we can more accurately monitor movement on both sides of his room. When the system detects movement, it will say to him, “Calvin, please go out of your room. Go on your computer.” And it will repeat this every 15 seconds until he gets out of his room. Obviously, Calvin wasn’t too happy about this change, so as you can see he unplugged the system and ended up hanging out in his room anyway.
But we’ll win the war.
A very important fact comes out of this behavior: Calvin views the voice as an authority figure. We’d be much more discouraged if he completely ignored it. This means that he will listen to the system if he can’t disable it.
My wife and I talked this morning, and I’m going to be adding two features to the backlog.
Feature #1: Get Bluetooth Working or Find a Lockable Audio Case
Call me old-school, but I like wires–they work 99.9% of the time. Wireless is convenient, but it definitely adds risk. We need to make sure that he can’t unplug the system.
Feature #2: Support playing pre-recorded video messages in place of audio messages
My wife and I discussed this idea this morning over coffee. If each of us can record a series of video messages (“Hey Calvin, you need to go play on the computer”), playing these in his room should make him think that we are actually watching him live since he can see our faces. I’m excited to try this.
I’m on PTO today, so I’m giddy to work on this today and through the weekend.
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