In-car leisure programs are absolute miracles for folks taking children on street journeys. Give the kids screens to take a look at and you’ll drive all day with out dropping your thoughts — or so I hear. In case your minivan didn’t include such screens and also you desire a actually nifty answer, try this DIY leisure system that stays in sync.
Albert developed this in-car leisure system for his circle of relatives’s use and it has a handful of fairly superior options:
- PoE: Solely a single cable essential for every seat/display
- Offline: Performs media from native storage by way of Kodi
- Expandable: It’s simple so as to add as many screens as you want
- Sync: Viewers can optionally select to sync playback, to allow them to watch films collectively
Personally, I feel that final function is the perfect one. It’s good to have the ability to watch one thing with one other particular person and this makes that seamless, whereas nonetheless giving every particular person an optimum viewing expertise. That is notably vital if the audio comes via the automobile’s stereo, as that is able to offering.
This does, nonetheless, come at a price. The choice for most individuals can be one thing like a set of Amazon Hearth Tablets, that are lower than $100 every. This method prices about $200 per display, plus the price of the shared {hardware}.
That per-screen value is a results of the strong {hardware}, which consists of a Raspberry Pi 4 Mannequin B, a PoE (Energy-over-Ethernet) HAT, and an HD touchscreen LCD panel. Happily, the shared {hardware} is fairly cheap. That features a pocket router, a PoE swap, and USB storage for media.
The software program relies on a DLNA media server operating on the pocket router and Kodi on every Raspberry Pi. That ought to be fast and simple for many “techy” individuals to arrange.