I built this project to see how far a Raspberry Pi 3B could go as a lightweight network-controlled media receiver without using a dedicated streaming dongle.

The basic idea is simple. The Raspberry Pi connects to a TV over HDMI and stays on the same local network as an Android phone. The phone sends playback requests to the Pi, while the Raspberry Pi handles the actual media playback.

The hardware used for the original build was deliberately simple:

  • Raspberry Pi 3 Model B
  • microSD card
  • stable 5 V / 2.5 A supply
  • HDMI cable
  • local Wi-Fi network
  • Android phone

Raspberry Pi OS was installed on the microSD card, SSH was enabled, and the Pi's local IP address was used to connect Raspicast from the Android device.

One useful part of this project was separating the controller from the player. The Android phone does not need to continuously render the video. Instead, it sends a request or media reference to the Raspberry Pi, which then handles playback and HDMI output.

The original experiment also used older OMX-based Raspberry Pi media tools. That is important context today: OMXPlayer has been deprecated and is not part of the current Raspberry Pi OS media stack. Modern systems use VLC and V4L2-based playback instead. I therefore treat this build as a Raspberry Pi 3 / legacy-software experiment rather than a drop-in replacement for a modern Chromecast.

It also does not implement the complete Google Cast protocol. DRM-protected services and apps that depend on native Chromecast support should not be expected to work in the same way.

The project was still useful for experimenting with:

  • SSH control
  • Raspberry Pi networking
  • local media playback
  • Android-to-Pi communication
  • HDMI output
  • building Linux software from source

For local media and for understanding how network-controlled playback works, the Raspberry Pi remains a useful platform even though the software stack has changed.

The original build notes and setup steps are linked in the project resources.