I recently hooked up a Raspberry Pi running Kodi to my Living Room television, and it was a hit with the kids (their favorite shows and moving more easily accessible than by swapping DVDs) and the wife (easy to run via a remote app on her phone).
Separately, trips with the kids in the car where they'd like to watch a video are currently a bit annoying because it means keeping a DVD library in the car.
Clearly, Something Must Be Done.
My solution: Install OSMC on a Raspberry Pi and then hack it to 1) be a wireless AP and 2) use a GPIO to signal an Adafruit PowerBoost 500C that it's time to shut down in an orderly fashion so as not to trash the filesystem.
On OSMC vs OpenELEC
OpenELEC is my usually-preferred distro for a dedicated raspi box, but... it's not very easily hackable. OSMC used to be raspbmc, which was based on raspbian, so it's a nice familiar debian base with scads of software in the standard repos. OSMC it is.
To get hostapd to work:
systemctl disable connman.service- disable connman, which OSMC uses for some reasonapt-get install ifupdown hostapd dnsmasq wireless-tools dhcpcd5 ...- I lost track of all the network tools I had to install, but that's a good start.- configure /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf
- configure /etc/network/interfaces
- configure /etc/dnsmasq.conf to serve dhcp and some minimal amount of DNS
- For some reason I had to blacklist the bluetooth module for my zd1211 driver to come up without a soft rfkill flag set
...with the result being a box that boots up to be both a wireless AP and a Kodi machine.
