Media Lab Workshop 2014 – The Recap.

We boarded that plane and started the mysterious journey on a Sunday night. I was lucky to join some friends from my hometown and others from Lamba Labs – Beirut First Hackerspace. We Joined forces and few hours later, we landed at Abu Dhabi’s airport and got our brain scanned then made it to the hotel safe and sound.

The next day, things started to gradually make sense. Snap back to reality, I knew I had a new quest to complete but I wasn’t really sure of what exactly that is. In fact, I wasn’t sure at all; the agenda of the workshop was clear and it’s definitely not a typical entrepreneurship event. I had a feeling we’re going to build something! The clock tics… and it’s time to begin.

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DIY Smart Television with RaspberryPi and Node.js

Image By http://korben.info/

Hardware Components:

Software Stack:

  • Raspbian – a fork of Debian designed for the Raspberry Pi 
  • Node.js
  • Chromium Browser
  • OMX-player
  • Youtube-dl – Youtube video downloader
  • Quo.js – Cross-platform swipe gestures library
  • HTML5, CSS3 transitions, Javascript, and Moustache as a template engine
  • Youtube API

End-result:

raspberrypi_tv_google_tv
Raspberry Pi TV with its special remote controller

Outline

  • Installing software and packages.
  • Basic shellcode
  • Server-side scripting: Node.js, Express.js, and Socket.io
  • Client-side scripting: Dashboard and remote mobile-app

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