Rii Mini Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Review

Wow!  I've only had this device for an hour or so now and it's absolutely brilliant.  As you'll have read from my previous posts, I am the proud owner of a Raspberry Pi that I am using as a Media Centre.  Up until today I was using a full-size USB keyboard to navigate the software as I couldn't find the Remote Control that came with my legacy Dell XPS 420 desktop that I have.

As I have not managed to locate where my remote control is (I have the USB receiver but it's not much use on its own) I decided to buy a compact keyboard and mouse and after several hours of looking at the different options I found the RiiTek RT-MWK01 and promptly ordered it from Amazon as the price was right at just £14.20 compared to over £20 for a lot of the other ones I could see.

It's not the latest model from RiiTek but it certainly does the job and the bonus is that not only is it the size of a typical remote control, it works really, really well and has a backlit keyboard so if you're watching TV with just a table lamp on you wont struggle to see what you're doing with it.

The trackpad is small (and not as useable as one you'd find on a laptop) but is adequate enough for using to operate a media centre on a computer.

Raspberry Pi As A Media Centre Review

It might not be Christmas Day yet but I already have a parcel to unwrap thanks to CPC and the super fast delivery by Royal Mail!

My Raspberry Pi that I ordered from CPC on Sunday has arrived so I now need to get to grips with it so I can set it up to be a Media Centre to play all my media files on my TV.

The first thing I did was to download NOOBS (New Out Of Box Software) which has the RaspBMC option in it which is the software I am using as my Media Centre - it's basically an open source application called XBMC that has been configured to work on the Raspberry Pi.

After downloading the NOOBS file I followed the installation instructions and downloaded, installed and run the SD Formatter utility and formatted the SD Card I ordered using the FAT system.

I then extracted the NOOBS file I had downloaded on to the root of the SD Card and then popped it in to my Raspberry Pi and then turned it on by connecting it to the USB slot of my HP MediaSmart Server.