Over the four-day Thanksgiving weekend, I worked on a DIY project for my home. The idea was to create a Linux-based media center on a Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi is a tiny but remarkably powerful computer on a circuit board designed by the good folks at the Raspberry Pi Foundation (http://www.raspberrypi.org). It can run a number of different operating systems, including various Linux-based distributions and a stripped-down version of Windows 10. The original idea behind the Raspberry Pi was to create a tool that educators could use to teach young people about computers and programming languages. The official, supported, Raspbian OS is based on the Debian Jessie Linux distribution and comes with educational games, math tools, programming environments, and other software packages for children. But the low-cost computer (about $35 on Amazon) has since proved extremely popular with the DIY crowd, who have used the thing to power everything from robots, to automatic plant waterers, to magic mirrors. Search the web for “Raspberry Pi projects” and you’ll find long lists of ideas, as well as fully developed projects that people have already created using the tiny computer.
I can’t take credit for the media center idea. Many intrepid enthusiasts have been there before me and passed down their experiences in a plethora of web pages, blog posts, and YouTube videos. Moreover, I’m indebted to the many programmers and open source enthusiasts who continue to contribute their time and skills to the Kodi (https://kodi.tv/) and OSMC (https://osmc.tv/) open source projects for the software to make this work. Nevertheless, I had to solve enough problems to get the everything working in my network environment and with my particular digital resources to make the project both engaging and fun.
The end result is a pleasing graphical application that displays on my television and offers a single interface to access and organize my entire music collection, all my collected videos, my digital photographs, and streaming media from various online sources. I orchestrate it all from a small, wireless, bluetooth keyboard or an iPhone application.
The hardware and software components I purchased to create this project are listed below:
CanaKit Raspberry Pi 3 Kit with Clear Case and 2.5A Power Supply – $49.99
SanDisk Ultra 64GB microSDXC UHS-I Card with Adapter (you could do fine with a smaller one) – $14.99
Logitech K380 Multi-Device Bluetooth Keyboard – $24.95
Western Digital My Passport Ultra 1TB External USB 3.0/2.0 Portable Hard Drive – $49.95
MPEG-2 license key – £2.00 GBP (from the Raspberry Pi Foundation)
VC-1 license key – £2.00 GBP (from the Raspberry Pi Foundation)
Total cost of project: $144.88
Book II 