Robert MacLean

Smarter Screen

Published on Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

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 behavior, 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 showstopper for me... so I put together a smarter screen.

Build List

Powering this is a Raspberry Pi 4. I grabbed the 4GB model, just because... I don't have a smart reason for that decision. If you're 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's 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, meaning it doesn't need line of sight. Since the Pi will be behind the screen, line of sight would be an issue. The remote "just worked," which was so awesome.

For the screen, I ordered a LG 24MK400H, which was perfect for my needs—wall-mountable and on special 😄. The mounting solution: I grabbed a Brateck LDA18-220 Aluminum Articulating Wall Mount Caravan Bracket, which was really awesome and easy for mounting. This came with instructions, but they were poor—experimenting first helped me find a happier setup.

With all of that, I had everything I needed to get it running.

OS

The Pi kit came with a MicroSD card with NOOBS preinstalled, and all I needed to do was, 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 center software. Going through the setup got it up and running within about 30 minutes.

Add-ons

I don’t have a "library" of media; I just stream the content I want, so installing the add-ons I needed was key. Here’s what I went with:

Notes

The only strange part of the setup was that each time Kodi booted, I got a prompt saying there was an update for LibreElec... but the settings for LibreElec had nothing in it for the update and no way to do it. 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-updated). Change the update channel to LibreELEC-8.0. Select available versions and pick the newest one (8.2.3 at the time of writing this).

If this was how you were trying to update, I'm not sure. I would say back up your LibreElec install and then start fresh with a new version.