This article is all about the approach I took to attempt to create a Raspberry Pi based Media Centre for my daughter. It assumes some knowledge of Raspberry Pi's (What they are, how to find information about them, etc) and is more a record for my own purposes than a step-by-step how-to guide.
There are numerous resources out there, even pre-installed SD cards to get you going. One of the most common current bits of Media Centre software is Kodi, so I will be going with that.
What I realised though was that I would need a lot more storage and would prefer something self-contained. I stumbled upon the WD PiDrive. This is a harddrive which is designed to work with the Pi.
What I have ended up with is the following (purchased from The Pi Hut):
- Raspberry Pi 3 Media Centre Kit - 16GB
- Latest Raspberry Pi 3 Model B (64bit Quad Core, 1GB RAM)
- 16GB Sandisk Ultra Class 10 MicroSD (pre-imaged with Kodi)
- Official Raspberry Pi 5.1V 2.5A International Power Supply (for UK, EU, USA & AUS)
- Black Raspberry Pi 3 Case
- 2M HDMI cable
- 2M Ethernet Cable
- 375GB Western Digital PiDrive - Foundation Edition
- Native USB 7mm HDD
- microSD™ card (preloaded)
- WD PiDrive Cable
- 2-year Limited Warranty
First, I backed up the SD cards using Win32DiskImager, just in case.
Next up I did a bit of reading, and wasn't sure if I would be using the 16GB Kodi SD card as I wanted things to run on the HDD. Reading the PiDrive FAQ, I could see that the idea is that you normally install multiple OS's allowing you to keep messing around with different configs for different purposes. That's not what I wanted. What I did note however is the instructions for expanding a Raspian partition to use the entire drive. (FAQ #5)
Feeling I was ready to start, I dug out a keyboard, screen, etc to allow me to start setting up the basic system.
Step 1:
Installed Raspberry Pi into case, inserted PiDrive SD Card, connected up keyboard, mouse, screen and HDD as per the PiDrive instructions, and then finally turned on the power.
Step 2:
The Pi booted into the PiDrive NOOBS options, I realised that I couldn't install OSMC from there, so I figured I would try the 16GB pre-installed Kodi card. FAIL! It wouldn't boot, so, lots more reading and then I downloaded the latest OSMC image from Osmc.tv/download/ and booted from that.
Step 3:
Connected up the WiFi and went through the various settings to change these to things that made sense.
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