The BetterPod
 The BetterPod truly sprouted from my obsession to make things that nobody asked for. In an age filled with cloud services and music/video streaming, why would somebody want an MP3 player the size of a brick? This thought crossed my mind but clearly did not have an effect on me. I built The BetterPod to be a spiritual successor to the classic Apple iPod. I made some different design choices that I am sure would leave Mr. Jobs scratching his head. I started with a first generation raspberry pi zero to power my creation. With debian linux running on a lower power CPU, I believed to have found a happy medium between performance and battery life. To further extend the battery life, I made use of an E-paper display, like what your old Kindle has. These displays only require electricity to change the image on the screen, not to keep an image on the screen. They also do not require a backlight. This made the device sip electricity when not in use. I wanted the absolute best in audio quality, so I purchased a raspi-audio 24-bit DAC with a 3.5mm audio jack. This gave a nice crisp sound through my wired headphones.
 I complicated the matter further by adding a lithium ion pouch battery, a boost/buck converter for charging and powering the device from the battery, and my own board for tactile buttons. These buttons included functions like play, pause, stop, skip, shuffle, and a safe shutdown button. I wrote the entirety of the software in python and used the pygame library to control the audio. I made different screens for displaying the current song with icons for pausing and playing, and the name would scroll if it was too long. I would play lossless .wav files to get audio quality that rivals astronomically expensive .flac players. The enclosure is 3d printed and the faceplate is held on with magnets for easy access. This was the first time I had successfully used 3D printing in one of my projects and I am proud of it no matter how crude it looks, because it still works great.