We are continuing to provide our Ham Radio Youth Expo displays at local Hamfests. We are always looking to simplify to delivery of our Ham Expos displays.
Dave, K1DLM recently suggested a great simplification idea. His idea is to replace the multitude of Laptop Computers that we’ve been using to display videos at our Expos with Raspberry Pi Computers. I wanted to share how we went about building our Raspberry Pi Video Players so that others might have the information needed to duplicate what we did for other applications.
Raspberry Pi Video Players
We’ve been using a total of 8 laptop computers as part of our Ham Expo displays and most of these only play video content. Many of these computers can be replaced with a simple and compact Raspberry Pi Computer.
The image above shows a closeup view of one of the completed Raspberry Pi Video Players. All that is required to use our new players is to connect the player to an HDMI display. Power is provided via a small USB power supply.
The players produce a very nice display on an HDMI monitor. We also connect the players to a small USB powered speaker to provide audio.
Player Hardware and Packaging
Our video players are relatively inexpensive and easy to build. Here’s a bill of materials:
- Raspberry Pi Model 3B + Motherboard
- Miuzei Raspberry Pi 3 B+ Case with Cooling, Fan, Heatsinks, and Power Supply
- 16 GB Flash Card
The parts cost a total of about $60 new on Amazon. Fortunately, we had most of the parts required on hand except for the cases which significantly reduced the overall cost of the project.
The current build of the Raspian OS includes a copy of the VLC Media Player which we use to play our videos. Playing high-resolution videos does stress the capabilities for the Model 3B+ that we are using and a few of our videos needed to be downscaled to 720p resolution to play smoothly. The downscaling was done using QuickTime Player on a Mac. Our monitors are 27 in or smaller and there was no noticeable loss of video quality at 720p resolution.
The processing load associated with continuously playing videos causes the Raspberry Pi to generate a good bit of heat. To deal with this and also to provide a nice case for our players, we chose an enclosure package which includes a fan and heatsinks. The package also includes the required USB power supply with an on-off switch.
Player Software
We enabled the Raspberry Pi VNC Server on our Video Players to provide keyboard and mouse access via Windows and Mac computers. This allows a single PC to configure and start the VLC players on all 7 of our Video Players used in our Ham Expo Display. We use the RealVNC connect client on the controlling PC to access our Raspberry Pi Video Players.
We also installed the Samba file sharing package on our Video Players. Samba allows a Windows or Mac PC to access the drive on the Players to load our videos.
The Model 3B+ provides both wired and WiFi access and we use the wired connection for loading our videos because it is much faster than WiFi. The Raspberry Pi’s WiFi connection is great for VNC access to start out players at our Expos.
Planned Use Of Our Players
The Raspberry Pi video players create an inexpensive and easy to use System for playing videos as part of our Ham Expo Displays. We will be using them for the first time at our Ham Expo Display at HamXpostion at Boxboro in September.
The resulting Raspberry Pi are very capable systems and I expect that we will find other applications for them as we go forward.
Fred, AB1OC
