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Media Server Workshop

Today, we held a Makers@AmherstMedia workshop in the BCRC on how to build a Raspberry Pi Home Theater Media Server. I've been wanting to build something like this for years, but I wasn't sure how many other people would be interested. Five people signed up, but one couldn't attend, so there were four of us in the end.

People had to bring their own parts. I got a Raspberry Pi B+, an 8GB micro-SD card, and a 1TB hard-drive. Unfortunately, it appears that the hard-drive may draw too much power to work reliably, so I still might need to get a powered USB hub to run everything.

The BCRC was the perfect place to do the workshop. We have Mac Minis with SD slots, which you can use to write the Micro-SD card and we have HD displays with free HDMI cables, so its easy to hook up the Pi and you can borrow the keyboard and net connection from the Macs.

Formally, the workshop was about Raspbmc but I downloaded and installed OSMC instead. It's still pre-release and I wasn't sure how stable it would be, but I thought it would be useful to see them both side-by-side. In point of fact, once they were installed and running, it was hard to tell the difference.

I had meant to dis-assemble something before the workshop to recover an IR receiver I could play with during the workshop but hadn't found the time. One of the participants had, however, and so we were able to see how that part works. It was encouraging to see how straightforward the configuration appeared to be. So much so that, during the workshop, I spent a few minutes trying to recover a receiver from an old data projector, but then damaged it while trying to desolder it. I'm not very good at that stuff yet.

Unfortunately, I could only spend a couple of hours and then had meetings, meetings, and more meetings for the rest of the day. Soon, however, the holidays will be here and I should be able devote a bit more time to seeing what this system can do. But today was time well spent -- and fun to get together with other interested geeky friends.