Rasberry Pi as TV controller

• Buy the meanest and leanest raspberry pi you can get. I got the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B with a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU and 1GB RAM.
• A good browser (I use Firefox).
• Avahi for zeroconf / discoverablility.
• NGINX as web server.
• A python http server script.
• A tiny web page

To display a web page on the TV:

Note: Your network has to support mDNS. Some corporate networks will block that.

• Via browser: Go to http://<pi-hostname>.local and a form will allow you to input a URL. That will start a browser session with that URL.
• Via terminal: curl --data "url=https://my.appoptics.com" http://<pi-hostname>.local:8000

When you submit a URL, the pi will launch Firefox with that url, wait for a bit, and then go into full screen mode.

Fast setup

1. Install Raspbian.
2. Launch sudo raspi-conf and
3. Expand the filesystem
4. Set time zone, language, keyboard
5. Activate SSH access
6. Change the hostname to something you can remember
7. Set to auto-login directly to startx
8. Clone this repo and cd into it
9. Run sudo bash install.sh if you want firefox or sudo bash install-chromium.sh if you want Chromium (recommended).
10. Set the screen resolution: edit /boot/config.txt. This configuration works for me.
11. Last but not least, check the autostart.md file for ideas on auto-starting the browser to a specific URL and settings to stop the Pi from sleeping

What is installed?

• jq
• httping
• firefox-esr
• xdotool
• unclutter
• nginx
• avahi
• vnc

Useful Stuff

Cloning

When all is set and done you can clone SD cards with rpi-clone. After cloning is complete, boot up the cloned Pi and change the hostname with raspi-conf.

Cron Jobs

To run scheduled tasks you can use crontab.

Run scripts on startup

To run scripts on startup, you can configure your autostart to launch a script.

Temperature probe

Turn your Raspberry pi into a tempreature probe and send the data to AppOptics.