I have had Raspberry Pi media centers around my place pretty much since the hardware hit the market, and while they have done the job I can't say that they have done it well or reliably, just ask my family. With the B Rev1 I had out of the box success with a Raspbmc build on Frodo in our living room. This encouraged me to purchase 3 Rev2 Bs to implement them as frontends for our bedroom, my daughter's bedroom and one to replace the memory lacking Rev1 board and repurpose that board as a tinker toy. That is when my bubble burst and paradise was lost. These Rev 2 Bs were an odd bunch as far as performance, I cloned the wonderfully stable image from the SD card on the Rev1 board as it was the fastest way I could get everything configured how I wanted, and brought them online one by one changing their hostname configurations as necessary.
I say they were an odd bunch because while they were all running identical images on the same class SD card with the same power supplies, performance and stability were nowhere near identical across the three Rev2s. One would work just fine for a day or two then lock up completely requiring a hard reset which around 50% of the time would corrupt the SD card and require a re-image. One would work, but the UI was noticeably more laggy. The last is very stable and performs well, in fact it is still running the same image I put on it 3 years ago in our bedroom I haven't had to touch it since I deployed it. I tried OpenELEC to see if a different distro was any better on these little devils, no dice. After a while I could only attribute these variances to the pi hardware itself as the issues followed the pis not any of the rest of the variables. This experience left a very bad taste in my mouth and I started the search for something better, with more horsepower and stability.
Given that my day job is best described as a developer for an R&D firm I no longer had to take the financial risk myself on these things, as an inexpensive micro-computer that is stable is very desirable as a platform to develop a project on, so I have had a chance to evaluate several micro computers. Many more powerful than the pi, but none as easy to get up and running on a project with, so the answer unfortunately always came back to the Pi.
Some hardware stability came in with the B+ and its superior power supply, but not enough to make me jump for joy. So I can't explain the amount of hope, and fear, that burst onto my horizon when I heard the announcement of the Pi2. My fears were soon alleviated and replaced with an equal amount of joy after reading some of the first hand accounts from those souls that had them in hand already.
We got some in for ourselves at work a couple weeks ago, but my other responsibilities there were keeping me from being able to tinker with them in the office. I asked the boss if I could take one home to evaluate, and to my delight he agreed as long as I made sure it was documented that I had it on loan, I don't think this blog post will count as proper documentation, but I'm documenting it here none the less. So my family get to be my guinea pigs for the stability of this hardware, but by now they are used to it.
Tl;dr : BOO!!! To Pi Rev2s. YAY!!! to PI2s, cool jobs, good bosses, and understanding families.
Now on the the project, a Media Center frontend and gaming system all in one.
The Hardware:
If you want to build this exact setup you are going to need to get a Raspberry Pi2 and all the fixins to power and connect it to your TV (SD card, power supply, HDMI), you are also going to need some game controllers. If you are like me, you still have some snes controllers or perhaps some gamecube controllers laying around collecting dust, if so you're in luck! Go get yourself a USB gamepad converter from amazon and you're set. I chose these http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002IXZ5DE/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 and http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0089NVTDM/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 they work great for my setup, no drivers necessary on raspbian just plug and play.
The OS:
This project was built on Raspbian, images are available from www.raspberrypi.org, I built mine on the 2-16-2015 image. Clone the image to the SD card however you desire, I prefer dd, but win32diskimager seems to be pretty popular. Hook it to your TV and go through the raspi-config to resize the disk, set the right timezone, change the password/hostname, and anything else you might want to tweak with the base raspbian build. I left mine set to boot to the console instead of starting X as we won't actually be needing X.
Games:
Once I heard about the RetroPie project back in 2012 I had a fit of nostalgia remembering all the games I played as a kid and wanted to get one spun up. However since I didn't want to have multiple Pis to accomplish the tasks I wanted, as I was certain the Pi 1 didn't have enough horsepower to do the job since it was struggling to run XBMC/Kodi, I never messed with it much. Once the Pi 2 was in hand I dug back in to the RetroPie project and seen that they had made tremendous strides since I had last checked them out and had a very simple to use setup script to take a vanilla raspbian build and install EmulationStation and all the emulators (Yay!) I followed the steps found on http://blog.petrockblock.com/2012/07/22/retropie-setup-an-initialization-script-for-retroarch-on-the-raspberry-pi/ for getting the Emulators and ES installed, I just went with the binary based installations as I didn't feel like waiting hours to test something.
The OS:
This project was built on Raspbian, images are available from www.raspberrypi.org, I built mine on the 2-16-2015 image. Clone the image to the SD card however you desire, I prefer dd, but win32diskimager seems to be pretty popular. Hook it to your TV and go through the raspi-config to resize the disk, set the right timezone, change the password/hostname, and anything else you might want to tweak with the base raspbian build. I left mine set to boot to the console instead of starting X as we won't actually be needing X.
 |
| Here's a shot of the raspi-config tool, you will want to do item 1 for sure, I suggest option 2, setting the time zone is under option 3. If you want to use the tool to change the host name it is under the advanced options menu. |
Games:
Once I heard about the RetroPie project back in 2012 I had a fit of nostalgia remembering all the games I played as a kid and wanted to get one spun up. However since I didn't want to have multiple Pis to accomplish the tasks I wanted, as I was certain the Pi 1 didn't have enough horsepower to do the job since it was struggling to run XBMC/Kodi, I never messed with it much. Once the Pi 2 was in hand I dug back in to the RetroPie project and seen that they had made tremendous strides since I had last checked them out and had a very simple to use setup script to take a vanilla raspbian build and install EmulationStation and all the emulators (Yay!) I followed the steps found on http://blog.petrockblock.com/2012/07/22/retropie-setup-an-initialization-script-for-retroarch-on-the-raspberry-pi/ for getting the Emulators and ES installed, I just went with the binary based installations as I didn't feel like waiting hours to test something.
 |
| Here's a shot of the RetroPie setup script, I did the recommended install then came back later and took option 3 to further configure my ES installation. |
I was also surprised that there were a few games included after the build. Here's a shot of the one I care most about and the reason I started the project.
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Media Frontend:
Next I checked out the Raspberry Pi forums to get Kodi installed on the same raspbian build an hoped that there wouldn't be any conflicts with dependencies. I followed these steps found on this forum post nearly to a tee http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=99866 I didn't do the usermod steps as my pi user was already in all those groups so they were not necessary on my system. But I did notice something potentially troublesome with this setup of Kodi, it would always blackscreen when I wanted to exit and never return to terminal in spite of me implementing the recommended steps in the post to prevent this problem. So I made a launch script that contains a watchdog that watches the Kodi log for the exit command then kills the process, which, while not pretty, did solve my problem without introducing any new ones that I know about yet. The script is in the next section.
The User Experience:
So now we have Emulationstation, RetroArch and a handful of other emulators, and Kodi setup and working on the pi. Now my family needs an easy reliable way to access both games and media without having to run command from the terminal. After opening EmulationStation and poking around at the configs a bit I knew I had my answer. What we are going to do is simply create a launcher for Kodi inside EmulationStation, modify the ES config at /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg and add a Kodi system.
vi /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg
Add the following lines to the end before the </systemlist> line, use nano if you don't know how to use vi.
<system>
<name>kodi</name>
<fullname>Kodi Media Center</fullname>
<path>~/RetroPie/roms/kodi</path>
<extension>.sh .SH</extension>
<command>%ROM%</command>
<platform>pc</platform>
</system>
Then make a directory for the kodi "roms" in the RetroPie/rom folder.
mkdir /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/kodi
Then make the script that I mentioned in the Kodi section.
vi /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/kodi/Start.sh
And copy in the contents from below.
#!/bin/bash
#first thing we do is launch the Kodi standalone binary and grab the pid so we can monitor it.
/usr/bin/kodi-standalone &
PID1=$!
# enters a loop to watchdog the log file for an exit signal
while kill -0 $PID1 2> /dev/null
do
sleep 10
kill=`tail ~/.kodi/temp/kodi.log | grep "remove window"`
if [[ -z $kill ]] ; then
sleep 5
else
killall kodi
break
fi
done
wait ${PID1}
Then make it executable,
chmod +x /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/kodi/Start.sh
Now you need to run the retropie setup script again and under Setup>Advanced>Autostart EmulationStation you want to enable it, while you're here, if you didn't configure your RetroArch controller I recommend doing so now. Once done with that reboot your Pi and it will come back and load into EmulationStation and you should see a Kodi system listed with the Start "rom" inside, this will start Kodi and when you exit Kodi you will come right back to ES where you can pick an Emulator or relaunch Kodi. You can load roms directly into the folders on the pi at /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/$systemfolder/ and they will show up next time EmulationStation is loaded.
I still have to implement lirc and the GPIO IR receiver I had set up on one of my old Pi's running Raspbmc but that is for another time, I have a nice little wireless keyboard that will serve as navigation in Kodi along side my Android and Yatse for now. You have probably noticed the little rainbow box is in all my shots, I did a bit of research and this is the Pi's built in low voltage warning so I need to get a better power supply for it. The one I'm using is a cheap 4 port Monoprice cell charger with a dedicated port that should serve 2A @ 5V, but apparently it doesn't hold the voltage under that kind of load. There is a way to turn that off in the boot config.txt file, but I would rather replace supply with one that will hold voltage.
Thanks to all the folks over at RetroPie for thier work to make this simple, also to Micheal Gorven for maintaining the repo for the Kodi build I am using. One more shot (sorry for the fuzziness, but you can probably make out what it is.) before I go back to putting this Pi2 through it's paces.
Good luck!
Next I checked out the Raspberry Pi forums to get Kodi installed on the same raspbian build an hoped that there wouldn't be any conflicts with dependencies. I followed these steps found on this forum post nearly to a tee http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=99866 I didn't do the usermod steps as my pi user was already in all those groups so they were not necessary on my system. But I did notice something potentially troublesome with this setup of Kodi, it would always blackscreen when I wanted to exit and never return to terminal in spite of me implementing the recommended steps in the post to prevent this problem. So I made a launch script that contains a watchdog that watches the Kodi log for the exit command then kills the process, which, while not pretty, did solve my problem without introducing any new ones that I know about yet. The script is in the next section.
 |
| Yay! Kodi is working! |
So now we have Emulationstation, RetroArch and a handful of other emulators, and Kodi setup and working on the pi. Now my family needs an easy reliable way to access both games and media without having to run command from the terminal. After opening EmulationStation and poking around at the configs a bit I knew I had my answer. What we are going to do is simply create a launcher for Kodi inside EmulationStation, modify the ES config at /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg and add a Kodi system.
vi /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg
Add the following lines to the end before the </systemlist> line, use nano if you don't know how to use vi.
<system>
<name>kodi</name>
<fullname>Kodi Media Center</fullname>
<path>~/RetroPie/roms/kodi</path>
<extension>.sh .SH</extension>
<command>%ROM%</command>
<platform>pc</platform>
</system>
Then make a directory for the kodi "roms" in the RetroPie/rom folder.
mkdir /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/kodi
Then make the script that I mentioned in the Kodi section.
vi /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/kodi/Start.sh
And copy in the contents from below.
#!/bin/bash
#first thing we do is launch the Kodi standalone binary and grab the pid so we can monitor it.
/usr/bin/kodi-standalone &
PID1=$!
# enters a loop to watchdog the log file for an exit signal
while kill -0 $PID1 2> /dev/null
do
sleep 10
kill=`tail ~/.kodi/temp/kodi.log | grep "remove window"`
if [[ -z $kill ]] ; then
sleep 5
else
killall kodi
break
fi
done
wait ${PID1}
exit
chmod +x /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/kodi/Start.sh
Now you need to run the retropie setup script again and under Setup>Advanced>Autostart EmulationStation you want to enable it, while you're here, if you didn't configure your RetroArch controller I recommend doing so now. Once done with that reboot your Pi and it will come back and load into EmulationStation and you should see a Kodi system listed with the Start "rom" inside, this will start Kodi and when you exit Kodi you will come right back to ES where you can pick an Emulator or relaunch Kodi. You can load roms directly into the folders on the pi at /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/$systemfolder/ and they will show up next time EmulationStation is loaded.
 |
| Kodi system in Emulation station |
 |
| Here's the script that we made earlier under the Kodi system. |
I still have to implement lirc and the GPIO IR receiver I had set up on one of my old Pi's running Raspbmc but that is for another time, I have a nice little wireless keyboard that will serve as navigation in Kodi along side my Android and Yatse for now. You have probably noticed the little rainbow box is in all my shots, I did a bit of research and this is the Pi's built in low voltage warning so I need to get a better power supply for it. The one I'm using is a cheap 4 port Monoprice cell charger with a dedicated port that should serve 2A @ 5V, but apparently it doesn't hold the voltage under that kind of load. There is a way to turn that off in the boot config.txt file, but I would rather replace supply with one that will hold voltage.
Thanks to all the folks over at RetroPie for thier work to make this simple, also to Micheal Gorven for maintaining the repo for the Kodi build I am using. One more shot (sorry for the fuzziness, but you can probably make out what it is.) before I go back to putting this Pi2 through it's paces.
 |
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