Raspberry Pi - $35 Linux computer

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Just ordered a TV HAT on a whim, for under £7 I fancied giving it a whirl. In an ideal world the Raspberry foundation would do a DVB-S / DVB-S2 TV hat; got an unused satellite connection coming into my man cave at home, so it would connect nicely into TVHeadEnd and be cheaper than a USB/internal DVB-S2.

Will see if I can then find a relatively cheap freeview aerial to connect up to it. Sadly our aerial at home is prehistoric, hence why we went Freesat - previous occupier had Sky so we could simply connect TV up to the existing dish etc.
 
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Really like the TV HAT case from The Pi Hut, which I've just been putting together. Just a PITA to remove the adhesive film that protects the acyrilic pieces, if you bite your fingernails like I do :eek:

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Got everything up and running on TVHeadend; nice little project for the Pi. I bought a TV HAT for £7, an aerial from Screwfix on a punt (£13) and put the aerial in the loft. TVHeadend picked up 160 services, a combination of radio and TV. @lucid made a bespoke cable for me to go from the antenna to the TV HAT, if anyone needs any custom AV cables he's your man.

Screengrab of my desktop, with the rather lovely Rachel Riley, showing live TV:

tvheadend.png


Being able to use it as a DVR is brilliant, it records to the Unraid NAS via a mounted share.
 
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You should also be able to integrate TVHeadend into Plex (or Emby), and then use them as the TVGuide/DVR, and stream to any device around your house that has a Plex client etc
Hopefully! The Pi is running LibreElec at the moment, with the TVHeadend server plugin for Kodi. Ultimately I would like to get Plex working as the DVR :)
 
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I like the project, pretty cool but my immediate thought was why not buy POE HATs for each of the PIs and replace the internal switch with a POE one, something like the TP-Link TL-SG1005P is cheap, albeit I appreciate this alternative would mean 4 Pis instead of 5? Cooling could then be provided by fans running off the GPIO pins on the Pis?
Yeah good point, not sure if there was a particular reason he didn’t go that route.
 
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PXL-20210722-134726882-Copy.jpg


Changed the lid on my Pi Hut TV HAT case - got in touch with Pi Hut support who sent out the lid from their 'fan case'. Fixed a spare 5v fan with blue LED to the outside of the lid, wired the fan wires into the USB connection block and then connected to the Pi's own USB. Now means that when the Pi is on, there's some active cooling.

There's not enough room to fit the fan between the HAT and the underneath of the lid, so it had to go on the outside. The only alternative was to have it loose between the main board and the underside of the TV HAT, in which case the normal TV HAT lid would be fine.
 
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Not sure if this would be possible but does anyone know if I could setup a pi to grab tv EPG data for offline viewing?

I'm only interested in the main FTA channels but would like the EPG data for each month
 
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I've not done it myself outside of tvheadend but it's definitely possible. I guess you could run tvheadend without a tuner and just run the EPG grabber. That would give you EPG data and a html interface that you could access to see the EPG.

Alternatively, if you google "epg grabber" you will find things like WebGrab+Plus that collect EPG data as xml from various tv guide sites using their apis.

You should also be able to find a suitable EPG viewer such as XML EPG Viewer if that is required.
 
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I've not done it myself outside of tvheadend but it's definitely possible. I guess you could run tvheadend without a tuner and just run the EPG grabber. That would give you EPG data and a html interface that you could access to see the EPG.

Alternatively, if you google "epg grabber" you will find things like WebGrab+Plus that collect EPG data as xml from various tv guide sites using their apis.

You should also be able to find a suitable EPG viewer such as XML EPG Viewer if that is required.

Never thought of TVHeadend, cheers for the info I'll take a look
 
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Fair enough. i do run Tvheadend but obviously I do have tuners and that's where the bulk of my listings come from. I do also subscribe to Schedules Direct as it provides extra info that the OTA listings doesn't give, or at least not consistently.
 
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Thinking of getting my 8 year old a Raspberry Pi for Christmas this year. I've been covering some basics of Python with him and he's a wiz at scratch. He loves building things, and I like the idea of trying to do some interesting projects with it based around the use of sensors and perhaps servos. Now I'm not very wise with all things in this space, but is there a good starting kit with a good amount of sensors bread board and servos? Or is there a better way to approach this? I did notice crowdpi which looks interesting, but pretty pricey.
 
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