As the title asks – what to do with a second Pi ? I “accidentally” ended up with a Raspberry Pi 4 1GB to partner my 4GB unit so what to do with it.
The original Pi has LAMP installed and running well. It’s also got 1TB of storage for all my videos and photo’s and stuff and we use it to watch movie’s and TV series using our lounge room TV as the monitor. It works really, really well so I’m quite reluctant to change anything. It does need a fan heatsink though, to keep the temperatures under control. With the fan it only gets up to 55deg C max.
I have a USB DVB-T/2 dongle as well as a Pi TV hat. The TV hat doesn’t fit on my 4GB Pi because I have a fan case on it and a couple of the GPIO pins are used to power the fan. The TV Dongle was pressed into service and works OK with TV Headend. It’s not as sensitive as the Pi Hat despite using the same chipset so I pressed an RF amplifier into service in the antenna cable and it works a treat.
So. In the lounge room, behind the TV I have the 4GB Pi with a TV dongle and a 1TB SSD with all my stuff attached. In the bedroom, where there’s no antenna socket, I have a smaller TV and a Pi 1GB. The Pi, using VLC, can play the TV from the lounge room Pi running TV Headend and using Samba can also play, using VLC again, all of our shows and movies.
Given that we’ve got good WiFi 5GHz coverage throughout the house thanks to a couple of WiFi extenders, for our grandson and visitors all I need to do to give them HD TV and shows and movies is to move the Pi and give them a keyboard. Our grandson can watch his Youtube stuff to his hearts content without annoying us.
Seeing as how successful that is I reckon another Pi to use for the same purpose in the BBQ area out the back could be the go. Watching the cricket while we’re having a BBQ and a few beers sounds pretty appealing to me. Setup is easy – Latest Raspbian with VLC, power supply and HDMI cable. Seems a bit of a waste of a Pi 4 though. I’ll have to have a look at the specs and get a few opinions of the capabilities of “lesser” and cheaper Pi’s and maybe get a couple more.