Despite a mis-behaving laptop, Dream-Mouse: an adapted PC controller, completed all of the testing this morning required to certify it as CE compliant.

Dream-Mouse will now move out of our development process and will be listed as a fully commercial product on the Dream-Racer web site.

Remploy have also completed their manufacturing audit and are ready to begin manufacturing it next week.

Stepping back for a moment of reflection; Dream-Mouse is the third product family we have designed, developed, CE tested and geared up for full scale manufacturing in 15 months.

Dream-Racer: radio controlled cars and trucks was launched in April. Dream-Gamer: an adapted PlayStation controller was commercialised in October.

And, 2008 will be equally exciting as we begin to move ahead with new life-style products for children and young adults with physical disabilities. Stay tuned.

Mike

For six years Disabled Living have organised the very popular annual Kidz Up North exhibition in Bolton, Lancashire focusing on equipment, products and services for disabled children and their families.

This year we decided to support QED, our UK distributor, by demonstrating Dream-Gamer and Dream-Mouse alongside Dream-Racer to the visitors.

Mark organised the games on Dream-Gamer and I set up Dream-Mouse. Trying to compete with Dream-Gamer was impossible: all the kids, mums and dads thought gaming was a lot more fun.

Next time I'll set up one-switch gaming on the PC instead of a demo that looks too much like school work. I'll be contacting Barrie at One Switch.org for some tips.

Mike

In my preparation for the visit to John Chilton School I assigned four mouse commands to the switches on Dream-Wand using Joystick-To-Mouse software. I found it comfortable to have "left mouse button", "enter", "double left click" and "right mouse button" on switches 1 through 4. Somehow, that suits me when I work with Dream-Mouse and Mini-Mouse.

A few minutes after Stephen started using it he said he wanted a different arrangement; one more to his preference and could we change it. Joystick-To-Mouse software is so flexible that within one minute we had re-mapped the switches completely.

The next student to try Dream-Wand, Alex, needed a different solution as well; he needed all the switches to work in the same way and I re-mapped all four switches to work the "left mouse button". This allowed him to concentrate more on the learning experience in the exercise than the switching itself which earlier had been getting in the way.

I also learnt how important it is, particularly to older students, for the equipment to appear discrete in order to avoid unwanted attention being drawn to the user. I didn't appreciate this when Sue originally invited me to visit John Chilton School but it's something we will be tuned into from now on.

Something else Sue showed me was "Orisinal". It's a superb site for one-switch and mouse control games designed with young children in mind. Try it.

Sue, I had a great day out and want to do it again.

Mike 

Recently I had a call from Sue, a teacher at John Chilton School in Northolt, London. Sue was interested in the Mini-Mouse we have been working on and asked if a few of her students could try it out.

John Chilton is a special school in the London Borough of Ealing. The school caters for pupils who have a physical and/or a medical disability.

We chose to run the demo on my laptop and use this blog post as a check on how well the students coped with the three Dream-Mouse input devices: Mini-Mouse, Pistol-Mouse and Cap-Mouse: each controlled by Joystick-To-Mouse software. We used the on-screen keyboard built into Windows XP for text entry.

This is what the students had to say about Dream-Mouse:

 it is a wonderfull joystick among other things  :)  ... by Stephen