I bought a Raspberry Pi a couple of years ago as well as a neutrino board but never got round to using it but your post has given me a bit of inspiration. I'm currently running Kodi on a laptop but want to build my own media centre as well as integrate some wireless house controls. The Pi has come so far since I bought it, and the Pi community has grown massively too.
I think a new Pi might be in order. I might even be able to get my kids (6 & 8) interested in a bit of programming.
Anyway. Thanks for the post. Upvoted, following and resteemed.
@jimbobbill the pi has come a long way. On the Pi3 there is ou of the box programming features which will assit the kids to learn programming using pictures. It is really worthwhile playing around with. The wireless feature on Pi 3 for me was a no brainer as thre is already so many calbles between the various devices around the TV. Rasbian is a good operating system to start of with as I first tried Ubuntu Mate, but Kodi is not supported and I really struggled.