It’s been a while since the last update and some things have changed, so let’s get into it.

Hardware

None of the guts of ProjectOne have changed, however my plans for the custom case have. The original plan was to build a custom case that held a Raspberry Pi 4b, an enclosed 2TB NVMe SSD, a fan or two, and some storage for some of the cables, making it a “grab and go” style device for travel. In addition, the case would have a few buttons on the front to specify things like performing a safe shutdown of the Pi, re-running the script to produce a new schedule, hard reboot, etc. Finally, I wanted to have all of the ports on the back to hide the cables and a USB port on the front for the IR Receiver.

Needless to say that things have changed. I’ve been planning and doing my research to see how much it would cost for me to do all of this, and it turns out that it would not be a very cost effective solution when companies are making cases with these features for dirt cheap and selling them on Amazon. I found out late in my research that there are a few extension boards out there for the Pi 4b that move the HDMI and power ports from the side of the device to the back; one of these boards can be bought for $14. But I also found out that Argon makes a case (Argon One) with this extension board included for $25 shipped. I can’t make a case out of thin plywood for this price! And sure, I can’t have custom buttons and ports like I wanted, however there are some workarounds for this. First, the Argon One case has easy access to the GPIO pins so I could possibly have custom buttons in the future. Second, the power button on the back of the Argon case can be used to safely shutdown the Pi or reboot it.

I’ll post more about the case once I get it in.

Software

Nothing much has changed here. I am, however, going to remove the Gaming channel and replace it with a channel dedicated to my son’s favorite movies and shows; this will all depend on how much space I free up on the external drive.

Contingency Plan

One thought that I had this week: What happens if we travel, plug in the Pi, and it doesn’t work? Maybe the script fails and I need some time to troubleshoot after we got home? What do we do?

I could bring along a keyboard and mouse, and choose the videos we want to watch, however that’s extra stuff we have to bring along; remember that the goal is to “grab and go”. I thought that maybe as a backup plan, I could flash an extra SD card with LibreElec, which is a lightweight OS with Kodi on top. Since I have the FLIRC USB IR Receiver, it should work seamlessly with Kodi, but I will have to test and make sure that it works at all. This way, if we have issues with ProjectOne, we can pop in the extra SD card and still use the system.

I’ve also created an image of the SD card so that if it fails, I can simply write the image to a new SD card and it’s like nothing happened. If you are familiar with setting a Pi up from scratch, it’s painfully slow and can take hours to get all the updates and tweaks done. All of the scripts for ProjectOne are just copied over to the Pi via Syncthing, so even if I had to reinstall Raspbian from scratch, I have detailed notes on exactly what the run, install and configure.

Final Setup, Regrets, and Thoughts

The final setup is essentially Argon One case, the external M.2 SSD enclosure, power and HDMI cables as the bare minimum carry. We would also have the portable monitor and 2 extra cables (speakers are built into the monitor and they aren’t half bad). I’m also going to look for a bag or case that everything can go into.

This project has been a blast to build, but there are some things that I regret.

First and most importantly, I should not have gone with the Raspberry Pi as my SBC; instead, I should have bought a simple x86 mini-PC with an Intel N95 or N100. Working with Python and custom modules, Raspbian and all of the little “quirks” I’ve had to deal with, I would have had better support and luck going with a x86 box instead.

Another regret is not doing my homework up front. I’ve spent a lot of money on this project and I’m ashamed to admit just how much. With the Pi setup, I could have just bought it without the starter kit, got the Argon One case with SATA SSD extension, and not get a few adaptors and such that I now no longer need. It is what it is, but let’s face it: sometimes you don’t know until you get deep into it, right? It’s a learning process.

I’m still proud of the work that was put into this because I’ve learned so much about the Pi, Linux and Python. I know now what it can and can’t do. My code, IMO, is well written and easy to read; even some other Python enthusiasts said so! Time will tell if this project will be “stable enough” for us to use a few times per year and if it’s something easy to take with us. I will say that in the next few years, we are looking into buying a camper so ProjectOne would be a great, low-powered fit for that.

Next Steps

Besides putting the code up on my Github repo, I do want to take a few photos and maybe a video to demonstrate what this looks like and how it works. Maybe I’ll get around to it one day.

I’ll also swap out media over time, replacing movies and TV series we don’t watch out for ones that we do want to watch.

Finally, I want to do some small “micro blogging” on the ProjectOne site instead of giant posts like this. It just works out better for me that way.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading and watching this project over the last few months! Stay tuned for some demos and other updates.