RPi3 Retro Media Centre - Part 1

(Yes, I'll be spelling centre the British way.)

The first and most important thing out of the way: the Pi Zero is up and running and all my other VPN, scripts, and dev platform is all sorted. So the RPi3 gets to stay as a media server. Rejoice! It’s started to misbehave a bit lately though... I went too high on the video memory split and playback of high bitrate streams stuttered. Personally I’d go no higher than 256MB.

So, into part 1 of this build. Firsly I want to see whether or not I can even power a HDD from the RPI3's USB ports. I remembered that I had some old 2.5" SATA drives lying around at work, so I've decided to borrow a few to see if I can get them running. Firstly I had to purchase the cable I identified in the last post. Unfortunately I didn't order it in time to arrive before Christmas. Damnit, Santa... I'm reasonably sure it's all going to be ok, but I'm an incremental test kind of a guy.

It also meant that I had to wait until I went back to work after the Christmas break to test this out. Boo. Luckily this meant I could refine the other part of this that needed to be sorted: the SD card. This is already done, really, and I'm using it in the RPI3 with the official case right now. I have to go through the KODI setup properly and see if there's anything I can tweak for performance reasons. I'll also want to see if I can slim LibreELEC down anymore than it already is or tweak some settings with it. Probably nothing to gain, but worth a look anyway.

In terms of looking for a case I looked at some old retro gear on eBay to see if anything took my fancy for a decent price. It was pretty surprising how cheap some really old gear is, but nothing took my fancy to be honest. There's also the issue of size. This package is quite small really, an RPI3 and 2.5" HDD being quite small items. So I want to find something that isn't too big, but looks good. Quite a tall order. Maybe there's something else I can cram into the case that would be useful if it turns out to be a large vessel, but I don't know right now.

It'd be nice if the original kit inside the case still worked as well, but that'd require multiple power supplies or for me to learn how to do electronics to modify it all to work off one plug. If I DON'T have it still work then it gives me more ability to gut the insides to fit all of my stuff in properly, which is nice. I want to come up with something new as a case idea, but I have a backup idea of an old cassette tape if I can't find anything. I'll want to use something more original than a VHS tape though, so I'll be looking for some esoteric old format. DigiBeta maybe...

So, first things first: can we power and read a drive? I grabbed an old 250GB drive from work and booted up with it plugged in. I used just the thick USB3 cable for now for power and data (the Pi, of course, is USB2 only). Aaaand it didn’t work. Uh oh...

This is quite frustrating. I did all my homework. I checked the output of my power supply. I checked the label on the drive to get the actual maximum power draw. And it still didn’t work. Is it the adapter or the power? I tried the adapter on my Kali laptop and it was absolutely fine (with only one cable too, so my laptop must have high current ports), so I’m sure it works ok in Linux. I mean, it’s just a simple block device really.

First things first: off to dmesg to check what happened when I plugged in the drive:

[ 4038.655457] usb 1-1.5: new low-speed USB device number 16 using dwc_otg
[ 4038.728753] usb 1-1.5: device descriptor read/64, error -32
[ 4038.908764] usb 1-1.5: device descriptor read/64, error -32
[ 4039.088770] usb 1-1.5: new low-speed USB device number 17 using dwc_otg
[ 4039.162119] usb 1-1.5: device descriptor read/64, error -32
[ 4039.342123] usb 1-1.5: device descriptor read/64, error -32
[ 4039.448961] usb 1-1-port5: attempt power cycle
[ 4040.042161] usb 1-1.5: new low-speed USB device number 18 using dwc_otg
[ 4040.455505] usb 1-1.5: device not accepting address 18, error -32
[ 4040.528853] usb 1-1.5: new low-speed USB device number 19 using dwc_otg
[ 4040.942196] usb 1-1.5: device not accepting address 19, error -32
[ 4040.942337] usb 1-1-port5: unable to enumerate USB device

Cryptic. Dr Google suggested this link which talked about possible power issues. There are lots of issues with SATA devices using these adapters actually. Most folk suggest using a powered USB hub (and severing the power pins on the lead going from the HDD to the RPi so you don't send any power to the drive).

So I'm back to square one really. I'll have to find another drive at work to test with. See if I can find one with lower power consumption. I did try with the second cable plugged into a 5V power supply (an iPhone charger with 1A maximum output) but it didn't make any difference. But when I try USB sticks they work. And a big 3.5" HDD in a caddy with it's own external power supply worked. I can only assume it's power and try another drive for now.