I have decided to make central location for free digital resources for church along with guides on how to use them including the minimum requirements for running the software. Many of these tools run quite well on the Raspberry Pi version 3, which make them useful on a very low budget.
OpenLP
The first free tool I would like to list on the site is a favorite of mine. We used it in a small church in Edgar Springs, MO with a Raspberry Pi 3 connected to a wireless keyboard and mouse combo unit and a fifty dollar projector from Amazon. It worked great, especially with the remote control features on the OpenLP mobile app running on my Android phone. The phone is optional, but makes the experience so much better for the person running the presentations during service.
The minimal requirement are a computer with a network connection, it does not need internet, but needs to be configured to communicate with other computers in the facility. The Raspberry Pi 3 B+ model meets this need quite well as the wireless card in the computer can be configured as a wireless router access point allowing the OpenLP computer to manage a private wireless network for remote control and other advanced features of OpenLP.
The basic installation is very straight forward, it involves installing Raspberry Pi OS on the Raspberry Pi, instructions can be found here. To do the installation will require internet connection, but if you are in an area where that is not possible, please e-mail me and I will mail you a microsd card with Rasperry PI OS and OpenLP already configured. The installation of Raspberry Pi OS also requires another computer connected to the internet for downloading the image and writing the SD card.
Once you have Raspberry PI installed, you will open a command terminal, you can do this through the menus or by pressing CTRL-ALT-T and run the operating system updates and install openlp.
$ sudo apt update Answer all prompts to complete process. $ sudo apt upgrade Answer all prompts to complete process. $ sudo apt install openlp Answer all prompts to complete process.
If you will not have internet access in your church you will want to configure the Raspberry Pi as a wifi access point. The instructions for doing that can be found here.
Configuring OpenLP is fairly straight forward and the documentation on their site is excellent so I will not attempt to rewrite the process. You can find great instructions here.
As always I keep this site as a free resource and I am happy to assist if you run into issues, it may take a while for me to get back to you depending on e-mail volume, but always feel free to reach out if you get stuck.
