Since the appearance Raspberry Pi In the market, users have given different functions to this small board. The most common uses are a multimedia player -with Kodi, for example-, as a retro console with the different emulators that exist on the market, or as a home computer. But what would you think use a Raspberry Pi as a Google Chromecast? Well yes, we can also turn it into a content receiver and in very few steps.
There are different versions of the Raspberry Pi on the market. The last one is the Raspberry Pi 4. However, it can be purchased only with the board, as well as with different cases that will surely better cool the team as a whole. Remember that you must control the temperature of your Raspberry Pi if you do not want to be left with a useless team.
Preparing the Raspberry Pi to turn it into a full Chromecast
To carry out the use of the Raspberry Pi you will need different things. And they are the following:
- Raspberry Pi (plate only o with casing)
- An Android mobile or tablet
- HDMI cable -usually a mini HDMI cable- to connect it to the TV
If you have all this in your power, The first thing you should do is prepare your Raspberry Pi to work. That is, if your version does not come with the operating system installed, you must download and install the system Raspbian (based on Debian Linux). You can download this from your official website (There are several versions for different platforms.)
Once the operating system is installed and functional, you will already have a Raspberry Pi for whatever you want to do: from office tasks or browsing the Internet, as well as turning it into a retro video game machine. But in this case, we are going to turn it into a content receiver through our smartphone Android devices.
On the other hand, you must activate the SSH data reception protocol. We will do this as follows:
- Go to the settings menu of your Raspberry Pi
- Click on the tab 'Interfaces' from the popup window
- You will see different protocols; you should only enable the one that tells you SSH (leave it in position 'enable')
Also, in order for your Raspberry Pi to be able to play the content sent, you must install different players: OXMPlayer (for videos and audio) and OpenMax (for images in JPG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, GIF, among others).
To install OXMPlayer, you will have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and type the following command:
sudo apt-get install omxplayer
Instead, for OpenMax installation you will have to follow the following commands in the terminal:
cd ~
sudo apt-get install git make checkinstall libjpeg8-dev libpng12-dev
git clone https://github.com/HaarigerHarald/omxiv.git
cd ~/omxiv
make ilclient
make
sudo make install
With all these commands we will already have both OpenMax and OXMPlayer installed on our Raspberry Pi. Now it is time to prepare our device with Android, from which we are going to launch all the content to our device connected to the television.
Preparing our Android equipment to launch the content to our Raspberry Pi as Chromecast
Now is the time for our Android mobile or tablet to be able to send all the content to our Raspberry Pi, be it videos, music or images. And for this, we must go to our Google Play account and search for the application raspicast. We leave you the link below.
Once the application has been downloaded and installed on our computer, we must take into account some data that we must enter in the application, such as the IP address of our Raspberry Pi, as well as the port it uses. To discover the first of the data, we will have to resort to the configuration of our router or through the terminal (Ctrl + ALT + T) and write the following:
hostname -I
With this command we will obtain a numbering which refers to the IP address of our Raspberry Pi. Write it down somewhere because later you will have to enter it in the Raspicast configuration.
Now to find out the port used by the computer, we must also resort to a terminal command:
grep Port /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Typically, it returns the result of Port: 22. Note this port as well along with the above IP address. Now, open the app on the Android device that you installed Raspicast on. Go to the application settings and click on SSH settings.
Within the new window you will find different boxes to fill in. And it is time to enter the data that you have previously noted. That is to say: fill in the 'IP/Hostname' gaps, as well as Port 22 in the 'Port' gap.
Normally in the username you should write 'Pi' and in the password leave blank -if the latter doesn't work, enter 'r'-. You can now start sharing content with your Raspberry Pi connected to the TV as a Chromecast.
On the other hand, lThe application has two options for sharing: files that you have stored on the Android device, as well as content that we see from sites like YouTube, etc.. Finally, we recommend that you take a look at the temperature of the CPU of your Raspberry if you do not have good ventilation in the equipment.