[_b8r0]

I was a little sad when I took mine apart to find that the chip was epoxied. I was hoping it would be something easily reprogrammable that I could give to my girlfriend to use at school (she teaches 3,4,5 year olds, so having a box that makes a noise when you open it is something that gets their attention).

[eitally]

After having received one from a vendor (Vidyo), I was looking into creating auto-playing video cards for my own company. It seems http://www.bigdawgspromo.com/ is one of the leading vendors, but their per-piece pricing is pretty hefty. Pretty neat stuff, and they are re-programmable.

[ctdonath]

Thanks for that link. For a long time I've toyed with the idea of a dedicated video card (as in business/greeting style); brings video to the self-containment of a book: immutable physical instance of content, including the reader/viewer. Still a bit aways from what I had in mind (think: little larger than a credit card, cheap) but well on its way.

[larrybolt]

That would have been too good to be true, haven't even thought about that!

I remember way back I was trying to make a cheap wifi-powered box with a display that could play short video's and stuff. The base idea came from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywr0A2aC_Jk, and I'd use a very cheap 3g-wifi router running openwrt as base. But in the end the firmware changed and made it impossible.

But nowadays with an arduino mini pro, i2c, cheap small displays or audio modules you can get a long way! It does however require you to purchase a lot of stuff like resistors, opamps, breadboards.. etc. And in theory, with the ESP8266-module you could make any device internet-connected.