As a kid, I annoyed my parents to no end making them rewind the same few VHS tapes for me several times a day so I could rewatch things over and over again. It also annoyed me to no end when my favorite tapes wore out and died. Sad times to be a kid. These days, we have far better technology. I was listening to a song by Omnia called "The Well" and really enjoyed the story it tells, though simple. It reminded me of the animated tale of The Deathly Hollows from the Harry Potter movie. It got me thinking about how to get more story time into the world. Then I remembered my project here. I imagined having a cartridge that you could just plug in and it would play videos. You could put anything you want on them of course, but something useful and educational would be best. Unless you're like me and like to binge watch Futurama or Spongebob on shuffle. There would be obvious licensing conflicts with selling copyrighted media, so a blank cart with an SD slot or built in flash memory and the video player software could just be sold.

The hardware would be simple enough and could be a generic design that could be used for media playback of any kind. Headphone jack, media control buttons, perhaps volume control, a "shuffle" button, maybe even a small screen for controlling the software. Another option could be to add a small screen to the GPIO port such as a Pimoroni Hyperpixel 4" display. Being able to watch TV on a tiny display attached to the keyboard and work on a larger HDMI monitor would be quite nice. Also being able to leave the main monitor off, or take the Pi 400 on the road and play media with a tiny display would be great. Such a cart would end up being more expensive than most other carts, as the display itself is rather expensive. Would be well worth it for what I do. I have a Vilros Pidock 400 that turns the Pi 400 into a laptop, but the display uses a fair bit of power and has no brightness control at all, which bothers me at night. Sometimes I wish I could just hit a single button and have something start playing, like a random TV show or movie. Another thought occurred to me: the Pi 400 doesn't have much processing power, and playing media on it will slow it down and may make it less pleasant to use. This could be solved by adding something like a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W to the cart to handle the actual playback. That would add options to have it stream things from other sources as well.

Possible hardware:

• Pimoroni HyperPixel 4" Display: $65
• Adafruit Cyberdeck Hat: $9

The two pieces of hardware above would be enough to get me started, with only buttons needed. A custom board with buttons and audio output would make up the finished item.

Software wise, I'd either use VLC Media Player for playback, or maybe write a custom program using ffmpeg as the backend. It would be easy to let feature creep take over on this and never get it done. Sticking to the core functions would leave it with play, pause, stop, rewind, fast forward, next, back, and volume controls.

This particular cart will have to wait until I get a few other pieces of the puzzle put together, but it would be something that I would use regularly as I work.The thought occurred to make a version or some sort of cable that would let it connect to a Pi 400 in the Pidock 400 and mount to the main screen to act as a secondary display as well.