Building an "all in one" media centre for the kitchen

[Halcyon]

I've been working on a little project for the past few weeks. I spend a lot of time in the kitchen cooking but my living area (with my main TV) is separate to the kitchen. I often have either music or a TV series on while I cook and have previously just used my laptop. I wanted something a little more permanent which blended in with the aesthetics of the kitchen.

This is my build so far...

Equipment / Materials

• Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ kit ($92.13)
• Dell P2418HT 24" Touchscreen ($396.75)
• Dell AC511 Soundbar ($59.40)
• 16GB MicroSD Card (included in RPi kit)
• 30cm USB 3 Type A to B cable ($14.48)
• 50cm HDMI cable ($8.98)
• 50cm IEC power cable ($9.99)
• Flirc Aluminium RPi case ($21.00)

Total cost: AUD$602.73. I bought the monitor and sound bar directly from Dell during their 25%-off sales.


The Build

It was simply a matter of flashing a Raspbian image to the micro SD card (I used the latest version available which at the time of writing is Stretch with Desktop), then installing Kodi. I removed most of the included software such as LibreOffice as it was never going to be used. I also needed to disable overscan in the display settings so that the entire display area was used.

I just mounted the Pi to the back of the monitor using some 3M VHD double-sided tape and used short leads so there was less mess visible behind the monitor and everything was neat and tidy.

I also needed to increase the amount of RAM allocated to the video card via raspi-config. I gave it 512MB. At the default setting Kodi was unstable.


Lessons Learned

• I initially used LibreElec as the operating system and whilst it was great and lightweight, it was a little too lightweight and didn't allow much customisation. I also tried Raspbian Stretch Lite but found it unstable. Kodi would often crash. Touch screen support was lacking under both systems. It would recognise some kind of input (i.e.: The mouse pointer would move) but not in the correct place and there seemed to be no easy way to calibrate the touch display that I could find. Raspbian Stretch Desktop picked up the touch controller (detected as a Melfas LGD AIT controller) without any problems and worked right out of the box, no calibration needed.

• The Dell AC511 sound bar is actually a decent speaker for the size. I just use the digital USB input but there is also a 3.5mm TRRS analog input if required. Stupidly, unlike most Dell monitors, this sound bar mount does not fit the P2418HT monitor. I did a little more digging and in the manual it specifies if your monitor manual (not the sound bar manual) does not mention anything about a sound bar, then the mount is not compatible with that monitor. This pissed me off. However I'll be keeping this sound bar as it's very unobtrusive and has a decent sound quality and volume. I'm just annoyed I couldn't fix it to the screen with the supplied mount.

• The stock Raspberry Pi case isn't suitable for media centre applications. The CPU just runs too hot and starts clocking down. I ended up buying the Flirc case which is a beautifully crafted aluminium case for the Raspberry Pi. Inside the case is a protruding aluminium block which when screwed together with the included heat sink pad, makes physical contact with the Pi CPU. This wicks a lot of the heat away as the whole case is essentially a big heat sink. My Pi now runs as a nice cool 40-45 degrees Celsius, even under moderate to heavy load with no throttling of the CPU speed. This case is an absolute bargain at USD$16 and is very well made. The case seems to have minimal impact on 5 GHz Wi-Fi signal strength as the top and bottom covers are plastic (my Pi still manages to hold a downstream/upstream connection rate of 325 Mbps over 802.11ac, which is the maximum rate the Pi will support).
  

• As with a lot of devices, the Pi kept wanting to default to the 2.4 GHz network because it had a stronger signal compared to 5 GHz, this of course meant that the performance was severely limited. I ended up creating a dedicated Wi-Fi network just for media devices and turned off 2.4 GHz altogether. It works well.

• Next time, I wouldn't bother buying the RPi kit as I didn't end up using the plastic case. Micro SD cards can also be obtained cheaply (16GB for ~$10) so I would just stick with the Raspberry Pi board and Power supply only which would save me about $20.

Issues

• Whilst the touch screen works perfectly under Raspbian, I still can't seem to get it to work under Kodi. Mouse/touch screen support is enabled in the settings. I'm still trying to get to the bottom of this one.

I'm still playing around with the software to get it just the way I like it, but so far, it runs really well.