If you do not want to buy another television, since your Samsung or LG Smart TV is new, but you want to try the Android operating system on your TV, the truth is that you can achieve it by following the steps that we will tell you later. Although, you will need to have a series of elements.
Today there are different devices with Android TV, from small players like the Xiaomi TV Stick or Chromecast to Android TV Boxes. All these devices come with Google’s operating system. Therefore, just by connecting it to our television, we can start enjoying this software. However, we can also install Android TV on a Raspberry Pi.
Get Android TV on a Raspberry Pi
This option is a very good alternative if we have a Raspberry Pi 3 or Pi 4 for each one and we don’t know what to do with it. Well, today we are going to learn how we can mount a multimedia device with Android TV to use it on our Samsung or LG Smart TV. In this way, you will not have to spend more money on an Android TV Box or a new television.
Before we begin, keep in mind that we will need a microSD card of at least 16 GB, to have enough space for the Raspberry Pi. In addition, the ideal is that we have a RaspBerry Pi 4 with 4 GB of RAM, again at least, so as not to experience performance problems. In addition to this, we will need to take into account the following elements: download a LineageOS image for Raspberry Pi (depending on the model we have), keyboard and mouse, HDMI cable, a pendrive, package OpenGApps and the app etcher.
Step by step installation
When we already have all these points, it will be time to move on to installing LineageOS on Raspberry Pi:
- Download the version for you Raspberry Pi 3 either Pi 4 and unzip the .zip file to get the .img image that we will find inside said folder.
- Now, we have to install the Etcher app that we told you about earlier, since it will help us to record the image on the microSD card.
- By the time we manage to install Android TV on a Raspberry Pi and start the software, we will have to complete its configuration: time zone, language, and other sections.
With this series of steps we will already have Android TV on this famous development board. However, we will still be missing some apps that are not included, so we will have to install the GApps. If we really need them. To do this, you will need to follow these steps:
- Put the .zip file of the GApps in a USB.
- Then, within the operating system settings, we go to Settings and activate Advanced restart.
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We go to the power menu, holding down F5 on the keyboard.
- Plug the USB into the Raspberry Pi.
- We touch on Restart and click on Recovery mode.
- Inside the Recovery menu and we touch on Install.
- We select the USB box.
- Click on the GApps, below, and slide on ‘Swipe to confirm Flash’.
- Then, click on Reboot > System.
In this way, once the Raspberry Pi restarts, we will already have the possibility of having the Play Store on Android TV to download other applications. And, therefore, when connecting it to a Samsung or LG television via HDMI we will have an Android TV Box.
