Write the full raspian image to our SD card. When it’s finished writing, pop it into the pi and power it up. To set up your image, grab the “on first boot” block, add the wifi setup block and type in your credentials, then from the settings tab, also add the block for “Add public SSH key” so we’ll be able to connect to our pi remotely. It allows you to create an image that comes preconfigured for your wifi network, which is perfect for headless setups where you don’t have to bother with a keyboard or mouse. I really like the tool PiBakery to do this. An 8gb microSD card is plenty of space for this build. The first thing we need to do is create a boot image for our Pi.

This is going to be a pretty code heavy project, but if you’ve never built anything with Raspberry Pi, this is a great place to get started. Fortunately the Raspberry Pi 3 is powerful enough to run the popular media server software, Plex, and with an external hard drive, we’ve got plenty of space for our library. Running a dedicated media server is the usual way to do this, but a computer that’s up all the time can be pretty expensive in terms of electrical usage.

If you have a backup of your digital media, it’s nice to have a convenient way to play it back.

Pi plex server