We travel in the car more than the average bear. When I was a kid the height of in-car entertainment was the original Game Boy and a Walkman. My sibling is many years younger so we never overlapped in what we wanted to consume.
But we have a close range of kids which have still different tastes, with all the usual conflicts. We have gone trough what I’d expect is a typical evolution in kid entertainment solutions.
Lets recap how we got here.
CASSETTE OF KIDS SONGS IN CAR STEREO
Bump on a log in a hole with a frog in the bottom of the sea…
DVD PLAYER
Kids still pretty small so they can’t manage the device. Single screen, hung between the front seats. Everyone in the car gets to sing along with Dora…
DUAL DVD PLAYERS
Three kids in the back of a crew cab truck, one screen on each front seat. Could display same on both or they could each play their own.
At this point we introduced headphones to the mix. We had a kids sized headset with a single cord rather than the Y, for when they weren’t tied together. When they were tied together, which was the desired state, an IR transmitter and headsets like you would use in a mini-van overhead DVD setup. We also have one of those so headsets were not dedicated to this system.
Kids can run the system, and they do it like you would expect. You find DVDs laying on the floor ground into goldfish and french fries and trash. It was self defeating system where the movies then wouldn’t play and from the back seat dissent rose.
Media needed to be removed from the equation.
PERSONAL DEVICES
An ipod touch came into the mix as a “Free with purchase” of a laptop. It didn’t have much storage but it did have some games. It was the next thing to be fought over but it was a glimpse at a solution.
Next we start making investments, not that all the DVD and players and headsets weren’t investments. But now its time for the big show. The big kids get tablets and the littles who are fairly close stay with shared DVD setup with the big kids helping them. This bridges the gap until the littles get their own devices after they get just a tad bit older and we decide to end the media mess.
Finally we end up with 16G Android tablets in everyones hands.
About the same time we started collecting autiobooks, and some inexpensive mp3 players came into the mix also.
This changed everything.
Everyone could do their own thing, they devised ways to play games together even though they were not connected to a network, almost there.
Limited resources
DVDs begin getting transcoded, and the media put in a bin in the garage. But a 16G tablet is no bottomless pit. At 600M to 1G per movie depending, after some games take their piece of the pie there was usually room for 5-6 movies at least, just depending on what the mix was.
The next bit of fun for Dad was “can you change my movies” at the end of the day. Which while a pain with multiple devices, a portable drive with the big library got it done. Why did someone have something the other didn’t? What do you want removed to make room for the new thing? Problems getting smaller.
Comms
What this calls for is infrastructure.
The first thing I did was to get a small micro-usb powered “travel wifi router”, thingy. Its a little puck with an ethernet port and a usb port for power. What this did was setup a wifi access point, which you could plug into a hotel ethernet and create your own wireless network.
Without the ethernet it made a nice little private LAN, and it ran off the same charger as all the Android devices. They are around $20.
This brought the kids primarily Minecraft. They could all play and share worlds and just chew up the time in the car. They didn’t always all do this, but it was like a pickup game, there to jump in and out of and it was a success.
shared resources
We have devices, we have network, what we need next is to leverage this into a full service entertainment system is of course, streaming media.
To go with the wifi router, a slightly bigger Raspberry Pi 2 enters the mix. Yes the Pi can replace the wifi router, but thats another (coming soon) story. For now it simply connects to the routers ethernet port and joins the existing network. A minidlna server, and a tiny 128G usb “thumb” drive, dlna clients on devices, and now we are at full battle rattle.
Multiple trips under our belts, and not a peep about changing movies, about who has something they don’t have, its all there.
what now
The gory details. Posts to dive into all of this, lots of things to dive into…
- Soldering
- git
- Ansible
- python
- oled displays
- case modding