Welcome to The Grok Shop and Part 2
in my series: The Kodi Compendium. So, like
I was saying in part one you can run
Kodi on just about any platform you can
think of. I used to run it on an old Dell
computer from like 2004 but eventually
it kind of started conking out on me and
I decided to upgrade to something a
little smaller and sleeker and also
cost-effective so I got a Raspberry Pi 3
B+ here and this kit from Vilros and
as you can see it's already pretty cheap
but a coupon and a few reward points
make it even cheaper! So, pretty much this
kit includes everything you need except
the HDMI cable which I already had several
of those. There's a lot of different kits
available depending on what you have and
what you need. The kit comes with a
polycarbonate case so you need to put on
these heat sinks. It does include the
thermal compound but I'm not totally
sure why because the heat sinks have
thermal sticky pads. You don't want to
use thermal compound underneath the
sticky pad. Maybe they included the
thermal compound in case you're going to
use an aluminum case. Either way, it's
nice to have it. Here you can see the
Raspberry Pi 3 is really nothing more
than a credit card size computer. One
thing about the Pi though there's no off
switch; so nice thing about this kit: it
comes with a power adapter that has a
on/off switch.
Of course, there's other ways to control
the power; we'll get into that more later
in the series. It's a good idea to use
some kind of case to cover up your PI to
protect against dust, accidental shorts,
other types of mayhem. This one comes
with two different tops: the one with the big
opening is for GPIO pins which we won't
be using for Kodi. Incidentally, GPIO
stands for general purpose input output
and allows you to control different things
with your PI if you want. I mentioned
briefly about other types of cases; this
is a pretty cool one made by a FLIRC and
it's a Kodi-branded aluminum case. I'll
be using some different cases later on
and I'll get into comparing the
different cases so on a 3b+ PI like
this your hard drive quote unquote or
mass storage device is a micro
card I got a 32 gigabyte but an 8 or a
16 we do fine
now for my HID or human interface device
for this project I decided to go ahead
with an Acemax wireless keypad works
in the 2.4 gigahertz range not bluetooth
not Wi-Fi either of those as far as I
can tell but did not appear to cause any
interference problems either comes with
a little dongle that you plug in to your
device the Raspberry Pi 3 in this case
and comes with a removable rechargeable
battery which looks oddly like the old
Nokia phone batteries it's kind of kind
of weird but anyway it's nice to have
the full keypad sometimes when you're
interfacing with Kodi especially for set
up
it also has backlighting and different
colors you can choose for backlighting
which is really nice I mean all this for
20 bucks you know it's kind of hard to
be I do have a way to interface with
Kodi with a standard universal remote I
got into that some of my jp1 series I'll
get into it more here in the Kodi series
in one of the later episodes so now the
thermal management and this current
generation of Pi is much better than the
previous gins and to some extent you
really don't need the heat sinks
necessarily but they will reduce the
amount of CPU throttling so I recommend
using them both just peel the backing
off don't use any of the thermal
compound place the large one directly on
the big silver chip that says Broadcom
that's your SOC or our sock or
system-on-a-chip includes the main
process or the ARM processor and once
you place it on just apply a gentle
pressure for about a minute or so and
then the smaller heatsink is going to go
on the little black chip to the right
there that's the network USB interface
chip and same process for that chip
okay with the heatsinks in place you're
ready to put the board into the case
bottom part first and it just takes a
little bit of finagling you want to be
kind of gentle you don't want to put too
much pressure on any one location just
keep sort of rocking it back and forth
and it'll go in there and you'll hear it
snap once it's in there and then the top
part of the case is even easier it's
just got some little flanges you want to
make sure those flanges go in properly
and just snap it right down
now in part three out get into the OS
selection and installation part of the
project but for now just to show you how
it's going to look with everything
hooked up the power comes through the
micro USB cable you had the HDMI cable
there and then we'll have the dongle
from the wireless keyboard and then
there will be an option to have a
network cable or if you don't use a
wired connection you can use wireless
I'll show you what the network cable
looks like in a second and then here's
the flirt I was talking about earlier
the it's basically an IR receiver so if
you use a IR universal remote you can
use that to control Kodi in addition to
using the wireless keyboard this
particular flirt dongle is one of the
earlier jinns there's been a few
revisions to it I'll put some links
below to the current gen release of that
along with the links to all the other
stuff below so know ya adding in the
Ethernet cable it starts to look kind of
comical with all the cables coming off
this tiny box but I don't like the
position where they put the Ethernet
port as you can see if you want your IR
dongles or your Bluetooth dongles
sticking out front your Ethernet is kind
of in the way I looked around there's
some kind of angled Ethernet adapters
you could use if you wanted like this
and you can even hook a couple of them
together maybe make a u-shape out of it
another option of course is just to use
the wireless this version of the PI has
a pretty good Wi-Fi including AC
2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi so
this concludes episode 2 and our Kodi
hardware platform selection and build
prep you guys be sure to stay tuned for
episode 3 and beyond we'll get into the
OS selection and Kodi install and
configure all that good stuff but for
now that's how it's done thanks for
watching