Cat TV with Raspberry Pi

2024-03-03 | By bekathwia

License: See Original Project Raspberry Pi

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Today we’re building a mini television for cats. My cat Benchley loves watching TV. It’s really a mini computer ‎since I’m using a Raspberry Pi to play YouTube on a little HDMI screen. Let’s get started.‎

Materials and supplies:‎

Raspberry Pi computer (tested with both 4 and 5)‎
Power supply
‎5” HDMI LCD display
Low-profile HDMI cable, standard to micro

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For this project, I’m using a display gifted to me by Elecrow. It’s a five-inch LCD with capacitive touch and ‎comes with an HDMI cable for video and audio and a USB cable for power and touchscreen input. ‎

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It works with my Raspberry Pi 5 out of the box, so I just plugged in both cables, as well as a USB speaker, ‎keyboard, and mouse.‎

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Then I created a first draft of the 3D printed enclosure, which has to fit the screen and speaker next to each ‎other.‎

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To use the speaker as the audio output, I right clicked on the audio setting in the upper right and selected my ‎USB device from the list. If it’s not there, you may have to do a few command line steps to install support for ‎USB audio. I installed Pulseaudio, restarted my Pi, and it worked straight away.‎

To develop the enclosure a bit further, I played around with speaker grille patterns and settled on this ‎segmented pattern with circles coming partway through. I think it’s giving vintage vibes, and this marble-effect ‎PLA is super classy. I test fit the components inside.‎

I used an HDMI cable that has smaller connectors than usual, so it didn’t add bulk to the size of the enclosure.‎

enclosure

Once I was confident my basic shape would hold and fit all my components, I started playing around with the ‎exterior shape and also wanted to add some ventilation holes because the Raspberry Pi runs pretty hot. I used ‎the honeycomb shape generator in Tinkercad to make grids of holes that are too small for my cat to reach ‎through.‎

I printed this final version of the enclosure in sparkly black PLA on my smooth build plate so the front of the TV ‎would be super flat.‎

Then I test fit the components once again, holding them in place with tape so I could test it with Benchley to see ‎if any changes were needed.‎

I’m just loading Birder King on YouTube in the Pi’s web browser and setting it to full screen. Benchley was super ‎interested, and even went around back to see if he could find any birds and squirrels inside the TV.‎

I discovered that the touch screen was a bit of a problem, as the cats would paw the screen and pause the ‎video. So, I replaced the screen’s USB cable with a charge-only cable, disabling the data connection for the ‎touch screen.‎

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Then I installed the screen more permanently with some screws and the speaker and Pi with hot glue. You can ‎set up your hot glue fast if you hit it with a little canned air.‎

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