OfficeDash home
Language: en

All help articles

Set up a Raspberry Pi as your office TV

A Raspberry Pi is a small, cheap computer that fits behind a TV. With the OfficeDash kit it starts the dashboard full-screen as soon as it gets power, hides the mouse pointer and lets you connect it to the wifi from your phone. You need no keyboard or mouse on the Pi, not even the first time.

What you need

  • A Raspberry Pi 2, 3, 4 or 5 with its power supply. A Pi 3 or newer has wifi built in; a Pi 2 needs a network cable.
  • A microSD card of at least 8 GB, and a computer with a card reader.
  • An HDMI cable to the TV (a Pi 4 or 5 needs a micro-HDMI cable).
  • Raspberry Pi Imager, free for Windows, macOS and Linux.
  • The kit: download officedash-tv-kit.zip and unzip it.

1. Write Raspberry Pi OS to the card

  1. Open Raspberry Pi Imager and pick your Raspberry Pi model.
  2. As the operating system, choose Raspberry Pi OS (other) and then Raspberry Pi OS Lite (32-bit). Lite has no desktop, which keeps a small Pi fast. The 32-bit version runs on every model.
  3. Pick your SD card and press Next. When Imager asks whether to apply custom settings, answer No: the kit does that.
  4. Wait until Imager has written and checked the card. It ejects the card at the end.

2. Put the kit on the card

  1. Take the card out and put it back in. A drive called bootfs appears.
  2. Copy everything in the officedash-tv-kit folder to bootfs: user-data, network-config, meta-data and the officedash folder. Replace the files that are already there.
  3. Open user-data in a code editor (or Notepad on Windows) and replace TV_PASSWORD with a password of your own. Keep the quotes. It protects remote access to the Pi.
  4. Open network-config and replace WIFI_NAME and WIFI_PASSWORD with the office wifi, again inside the quotes. You can also leave them as they are and connect the wifi from your phone in step 4.

Use a plain text editor, not TextEdit or Word: they turn straight quotes into curly ones, and then the Pi can't read the file. Setting up more than one TV? Give each card its own hostname in user-data, such as officedash-tv-2. Outside the Netherlands, replace NL in both files with your country code, such as BE, DE or FR.

3. Start the Pi

Eject the card, put it in the Pi, connect the TV with HDMI and only then plug in the power. The first start installs the TV software. That takes 10 to 30 minutes and needs internet; the TV says that it is installing. Leave the power on until the pairing screen appears.

4. Connect the wifi from your phone

If the Pi can't get online, for instance because you left the wifi details out, the TV shows "Connect this TV to wifi" after about 90 seconds:

  1. On your phone or laptop, join the open wifi network OfficeDash-Setup, or scan the QR code on the TV.
  2. A setup page opens by itself. If it doesn't, go to http://10.42.0.1 in your browser.
  3. Pick the office wifi, enter its password and press Connect. Already on that wifi with your phone? Copy the password on an iPhone from the Passwords app under Wi-Fi, or on Android under Settings, Wifi, the network, Share.

The setup network closes and the TV shows the dashboard once it is online. If the password was wrong, OfficeDash-Setup comes back within a minute with the reason on the page. The same screen returns whenever the TV loses its network for more than 90 seconds, for instance after a move to another office.

5. Pair the TV

Once the Pi is online, the TV shows the pairing screen with a code. Approve it on Pair a TV as described in Pair a TV. The Pi remembers the pairing, also after a power cut.

When something goes wrong

  • The TV stays on a text screen for more than 30 minutes: the Pi has no internet. Connect a network cable, or connect the wifi from your phone as in step 4. The installation carries on by itself.
  • The TV shows nothing at all: check that the HDMI cable was plugged in before the power, and that the TV is on the right input.
  • Start over: write the card again in step 1 and copy the kit once more. Then pair the TV again.