The Raspberry Pi was originally a development board, but it's also a small PC that you can use often, including streaming content from smartphone to television, to do the same thing Chromecast does. Want to know how to do it? Read it carefully and you'll see how easy it is.
Prerequisites
To complete this course you will need the following:
- Raspberry Pi with Raspbian Functional System.
- Raspberry power cable, and HDMI cable for connecting it to the TV.
- USB keyboard to connect to Raspberry (only needed to configure it).
- Internet connection, either via cable or via WiFi adapter.
- An Android smartphone.
Similarly, you will need to download the free app on your smartphone Raspicast.
Set up a Raspberry Pi
Below we will show you the first steps you need to do in the Raspberry Pi configuration, to work with Raspicast and you can stream the content of the smartphone to it.
Install required storage locations and applications
First of all, we have to have GIT and Make packages, which are usually installed on Raspbian but it doesn't hurt to be sure they do. To do this, you must use the following command:
sudo apt-get to install git make-up
We should also have OMXPlayer installed, which we can install with the following command:
sudo apt-get to install omxplayer -y
OMXPlayer can only process audio and video content but not static images, so we'll also need to install OpenMax, a fast GPU viewer designed specifically for the Raspberry Pi. To do this, we must perform the following commands:
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/HaarigerHarald/omxiv.git
sudo apt-get put libjpeg8-dev libpng12-dev
cd ~ / omxiv
make a lclient
do
sudo make install
With this, we will already have OpenMax Image Viewer installed and running on the Raspberry Pi.
Enable SSH
The next step is to enable SSH connectivity, as it is a method used by Raspicast to connect Raspberry with a smartphone application. You can do this with the command line or with the Raspbian UI, and in this case we will use a graphical interface.
In the toolbar, select the Raspberry Pi icon and navigate to Preferences -> Raspberry Pi Settings.
You should now select the "merge" tab, search for SSH and mark it enabled.
After doing so, click OK to close it, and it returns to the console, because there is a previous step to take. At the terminal, use the following command:
hostname -I
This will give you the IP address of the device, which you should write down because we will use it in the next step. Once this is done, it is important to restart the Raspberry Pi to get the changes we have made to work (by enabling SSH).
Use the Raspberry Pi as if it were a Chromecast
Now that we have the Raspberry Pi ready, we're starting to use it as a Chromecast. Ideally you should connect Raspberry to the television and turn it on, to quickly open the Raspicast program on a smartphone that should be connected to the same network as the Raspberry Pi.
Raspicast will ask you to configure the SSH server. In Hostname or IP, you must enter the Raspberry IP you should have noted in the previous step. It will also ask you for a username and password, which is what you have set up for Raspbian. If you don't know, the default user to use is "pi" and the password is "raspberry". All other options can be left by default.
Now just click on "Cast" and you can now stream the content you want from smartphone to TV using Raspberry Pi.
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