How to Turn a Raspberry Pi into a Video Conference Station

Turn a Raspberry Pi into a Video Conference Station

In these times, being able to make a videoconference from home has become something not only common, but often necessary. There are not a few workers and even students who have had to get hold of a webcam to be able to attend to their work and educational needs , and for this reason if you have a Raspberry Pi collecting dust in a drawer, we are going to show you how you can turn it into a videoconference station simply, quickly and investing little money.

The idea of this project is to dedicate a Raspberry Pi and certain accessories exclusively to mount a kind of video conference station, so that you do not have to use your PC or other devices for it. With tools such as Google Meet or Zoom and of course with the help of a Raspberry Pi and a webcam you will be able to keep in touch with people anywhere in the world, whether for work or study.

Raspberry Videoconferencia

What do you need to do a video conference on the Raspberry Pi?

Next we are going to list the materials you will need, although keep in mind that these are our recommendations and of course you can change one or the other things depending on your needs and budget:

  • A Raspberry Pi , preferably a Pi 4 with 8 GB since its SoC is much more powerful than previous models, and you will need this power for video encoding of video conferences. However, most models will work quite decently.
  • An external monitor with speakers (an old TV but with HDMI would be ideal).
  • USB keyboard and mouse .
  • A USB webcam . You can also use the Raspberry Pi Camera if you have it. However, given the plug & play nature of USB devices, most webcams will work without a problem.
  • Microphone If your monitor does not have speakers you can use a headset with a microphone but that is USB instead.

Configure the Raspberry Pi as a video conference station

To get started, you need to install Raspberry Pi OS on your device. You can use other operating systems, but Chromium (built into Rasberry Pi OS) uses hardware acceleration, something that will greatly increase performance when making a video conference.

The next step is to connect everything: the monitor via HDMI and the peripherals via USB. Obviously you must also connect your device to the network, either through an RJ-45 LAN cable or with a WiFi adapter, but the fact is that without Internet you will not be able to make videoconferences of course.

Zoom

Zoom is one of the most popular video conferencing tools and it is probably one of the ones you want to use for it. Although Zoom has a native application for Linux operating systems, for now it is not compatible with the ARM architecture of the Raspberry Pi processor, but luckily you can use its web interface without any problems.

When entering a videoconference created in Zoon, you simply have to bear in mind that when you click on the link you will get a message to open ” xdg-open “, and you will have to click on cancel .

When you have done it, click on the “Open in browser” option and voila, you will have already accessed the conference by Zoom through your browser on the Raspberry Pi.

Google Meet

Google Meet works directly from the browser, so you won’t have to install an app or do any trickery like Zoom to get it working. Simply open Chromium, access the video conference link through Google Meet, enter your account credentials and voila, you can now access the meeting.

Google Meet Raspberry

Skype, Jitsi and other tools

Of course, although Google Meet and Zoom are the most used applications, they are not the only ones, and we cannot detract from others such as Skype for example. For Skype, there is also no native application so you can enter through the web as with Meet (just go to https://web.skype.com to access its web interface).

For Jitsi it is more or less the same. Click on the link of the videoconference that they will have sent you and you will directly access their web interface without problems.