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— 1 -12/2013
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o RCA Video: analog com-
posite video output
o HDMI: for digital audio
and video output
o Micro-USB: for connec-
tion of a power supply
The most interesting part
about the Pi is its price: offi-
cially the Raspberry Pi Model
B costs about US$ 35 plus
shipping and any applicable
taxes. In Europe you can get
the Pi for about 35 Euros.
Why such a low price? It’s be-
cause this mini computer was
developed by the Raspberry
Pi Foundation; their goal is
to make a very inexpensive
computer available to every
child in an effort to get kids
at their young age interested
in programming just like it
was back in the days of 8-bit
computers like the Spectrum
and the Commodore 64. For
everyone else it’s just fun to
be as creative as you want to
be with this little circuit board
and develop applications that
would previously have been
unrealistic because of the
costs that would have been
involved.
The Raspberry Pi is manu-
factured in cooperation with
Farnell and RS Electron-
ics. The little circuit board
is powered by a Micro USB
power supply, the same kind
that is used with today’s
modern Smartphones. You
would also need an SD card.
We recommend an 8GB card.
A suitable housing can now
also be purchased for around
6 Euros and this is probably
not a bad idea as it would
help prevent any accidental
short circuits and also help
protect it against any static
discharge. We used the Pi
for weeks without any hous-
ing, repeatedly touching and
handling it, and nothing hap-
pened to it.
Since the circuit board is
so small, it can easily be hid-
den behind any TV. For the
keyboard and mouse, a wire-
less version with both inte-
grated into one unit would
be the best option. It would
be easy to find a keyboard
3. The webpage “openelec.thestateofme.com” features all
published versions of OpenELEC for Raspberry Pi, including
Windows-friendly *.img version, which can be easily flashed using
Image Writer, whose Windows version is called Win32 Disk Imager.
4. Just download the latest rXXXXX.img.zip File and extract it with
your favourite compressing tool.
5. Use Win32 Disk Imager to write the image file onto the SD card.
We recommend the use of 8GB SD cards with 6x speed or better.
The card is written with 10MB/s which is not that bad. Flashing
should take less than a minute.
6. When the flashing is finished, a message box appears. Don’t
remove the card yet, because we need to write the license keys for
the MPEG2 decoder.
7. On the root of the freshly written SD card you will find a file
called “config.txt”. Open it with a text editor (we prefer to use the
free Notepad++) and scroll down to the license keys section. Copy
& paste the license file you
received from the Raspberry
Pi store. After completing the
purchase our keys arrived
about 2 hours later, but the site
mentions that it could take up to
72 hours.
labeled “Multimedia” or “TV’
that would have an integrat-
ed trackball or a touchpad as
the mouse.
Very important: in order to
keep the price of the Rasp-
berry Pi low, the necessary
license to play back MPEG2
content is missing from the Pi
even though the hardware is
available to do just that. But
this is necessary to display
IPTV since most of the chan-
nels that are transmitted in
SD are encoded in MPEG2.
In the Raspberry Pi Founda-
tion’s webshop you can buy
an MPEG2 license for 3.00 Eu-
ros. You’ll get a key e-mailed
to you that will activate this
function. This key must be
placed in the right spot in the
config.txt file on the SD card.
From this point on, MEG2 en-
coded content with hardware
