TURN YOUR DUMB TV INTO A SMART ONE WITH A RASPBERRY PI

Enjoy video on demand and more Nik Rawlinson finds out how the humble Pi can transform your TV

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Old TVs are cheap to replace, even if you’re buying something larger or smarter. But disposing of a spare display is wasteful. It could be given a second life in a kitchen or bedroom – and, while you can’t make your old TV any bigger, you can make it a lot smarter, quite easily and cheaply.

As you’ll have gathered from the title, the secret ingredient is the Raspberry Pi. One option is to attach the Pi directly to your TV, something that’s gloriously easy to do thanks to the Pi’s integrated HDMI. But for an even better experience you can set up your Raspberry Pi as a network server, and use it in combination with a streaming device such as the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K, Chromecast or the Roku Express HD Streaming Media Player, to browse and play your own media library.

Going this way doesn’t add much to the cost – the various streaming stick models all start at around £35. They can plug directly into a spare HDMI port on the back of the TV, so they’re very neat (the only other cable required is a USB connection for power), and they come with convenient bundled remote controls, allowing easy access to the stick’s native apps, plus your own media and other content served up by the Pi.

SPEC UP YOUR RASPBERRY PI

If you have any sort of Raspberry Pi sitting idle, you can probably use it for this project. We’re going to use the DietPi OS, which is light enough to work well on older boards such as the Raspberry Pi 3, and you don’t need any additional hardware on the Pi side, beyond the usual power supply and microSD card.