I spend a lot of time in the kitchen, I love to cook and so I am often in there with my phone listening to a podcast or, if it is a Saturday morning, watching Show of the week. I am not alone in this behaviour, everyone in my home does this and often at dinner we share youtube videos by propping a phone up on the toaster and huddling around it. This was clearly time to improve the experience with a kitchen screen - a smart TV would be perfect but their lack of support means it is a show stopper for me… so I put together a smarter screen.
Build List
Powering this is a Raspberry Pi 4. I grabbed the 4Gb model, just cause… I don’t have a smart reason for that decision. If you are in South Africa, I grabbed mine from PiShop and grabbed the essentials kit. Putting together the “case” was maybe the most head-scratching aspect since it is just screws, plastic and a fan… no instructions.
Also ordered from PiShop was the remote control since I want this to be like a TV, I do not want a keyboard or mouse. I opted for the OSMC Remote Control which has a small USB dongle and uses radio signals rather than infrared, which means it does not need line of sight. Since the Pi will be behind the screen, the line of sight will be an issue. The remote “just worked” which was so awesome.
For the screen, I ordered a LG 24MK400H which was the perfect side for my needs, wall-mountable and on special 😄 The mounting solution I grabbed a Brateck LDA18-220 Aluminum Articulating Wall Mount Caravan Bracket, which is really awesome and easy for mounting. This came with instructions but they were poor and going with experimenting first helped me find a happier setup.
With all of that, I had everything I needed to get running.
OS
The Pi kit came with a MicroSD card with NOOBS preinstalled on it and all I needed to do is when booting, hold shift and select the LibreElec OS to install. LibreElec is a really basic OS which is “just enough” to run the Kodi media centre software. Going through the setup on that got it up and running within about 30min.
Add-ons
I don’t have a “library” of media, rather I just stream the content I want so installing the add-ons I needed was key to set up, and I went with:
- YouTube
- TubeCast, this lets me cast from my phone to the Kodi
- Twitch
- Amazon Prime Video (VOD), this is for streaming Amazon and not for the buying of movies
- Netflix, this has a really great guide to getting started with 3rd party add-ons which are worth your time
Notes
The only strange part of the setup was that each time the Kodi booted, I got a prompt saying there is an update for LibreElec… but the settings for LibreElec had nothing in it for the update and no way to do the update. Thanks to Reddit I was able to switch it to manual and update the setup and then switch it back.
Go to Settings > LibreELEC > System. Change automatic updates to ‘manual’ (I’m not even sure if auto update works at all, I’ve had it set to that before and it never auto updates). Change update channel to LibreELEC-8.0. Select available versions and select the newest one (8.2.3 at time of writing this).
If this was how you were trying to update, then I’m not sure. I would say backup your LibreELEC install and then start fresh with a new version.