Introduction: DIY - Mini Home Theater Using Raspberry Pi 3

About: interest in iot, automation, technology. today still work as sofware engineer in largest Telco Company in Indonesia

On this occasion I will share how to make your own mini home theater using raspberry pi. You may go visit this video if you prefer to watch it.

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Why we have to build our own mini home theater ? What are the advantages instead of buying the whole set home theater which is being sold by many manufactures out there ?

Step 1: Advantages Vs Disadvantages

Advantages :

1. It is cheaper

2. It is very customizable to choose your parts (it may depend on your budget, favourite brands, so on)

3. You make your common television to be smarter :D

4. By default you still can do many things inside your tv, you may have office tools (similar software like word and excel) , mini games, and still can browse internets

5. Do some pretty cool stuff :D

6. You do not need physical remote-control since you control it through your smartphone


Disadvantages :

1. Quality must be lower ??? (not exactly, depends on your each part you choose as speaker, tv, etc)

2. Need time to make your own mini home theater (I think this could be your trade-off to be more creative :D :D)

Step 2: Materials

Must-have materials you need to provide :

1. Raspberry pi 3

2. Television with HDMI Port

3. HDMI Cable

4. Modem / Hotspot

5. Wire / Wireless Speaker

6. Handphone (will be your remote control)

Step 3: Install Kodi on Raspbian

Pretty simple and straightforward, login to your raspberry pi and type the following commands :

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kodi

Step 4: Connect All Peripherals

Connect all peripherals as the figure show, you may do the following steps:

1. Connect output audio jack in raspberry pi to the input speaker

2. Connect the raspberry pi to television through HDMI cable

3. Power your raspberry pi, television, speaker

Step 5: Do a Little Bit Configuration

Now we are going to config our Kodi so that we can control our mini home theater through our handphone / tablet :

1. Turn on all peripherals, speaker, television and raspberry pi

2. On your television, it will appear that raspberry pi is booting up

3. Once it's done (raspberry shows in the middle of the screen) please go to the top-left menu and hover on the "Sound and Video" --> "Kodi Media Center"

4. And then Kodi Multimedia Player will change the whole screen

5. Go through the "System" --> "Settings"

6. Go to "Remote Control" menu --> Enable the second option, it states that "Allow remote control by programs on the other systems"

7. Go to "Web Server" menu --> and do the following configuration :

Port : 8080

Username : kodi

Password : kodi1234

Now turn out to handphone :

1. Open your browser and type the ip static and port

2. Input the username and password

3. Once it's successful go to Remote Menu and then it will appear the remote control

Step 6: Here We Go !!!

Now we can play videos, music or show many pictures in the gallery :D

Have a fun and creative day !!!