Almost every police show or movie illustrates this when officers interrogate a suspect. Smart mirrors all work around the same principle: they display an image on a screen mounted behind a two-way mirror that allows a small amount of light to pass through, letting you see the display, while still retaining the reflective properties of a mirror. Combine that with the power, size, and form factor of Raspberry Pi 3A+, and you have yourself a magic recipe. We’ll be building one into a frameless modern design using standard-sized parts and materials in order to minimise the DIY tools and skills required. Happily, display technology has advanced, and now is an excellent time to revisit this project using new low-voltage, ultra-slim displays. As a result, a smart mirror was not usually a realistic project unless you were completely comfortable dealing with high-voltage electricity, not to mention having the DIY skills required to make a custom frame. The makers of early smart mirrors often had to remove a bulky computer monitor from its housing, which entailed dealing with power and wiring issues. Their popularity and appeal haven’t declined with time, and the idea of performing your morning ablutions in front of a mirror that displays your day’s schedule, monitors your home’s systems, and offers up a cheeky joke still sounds a bit like a scene out of a sci-fi movie. If you'd like to add some custom behaviour to Alexa, checkout this post on how to do it.Smart mirrors, or magic mirrors as they’re often called, have been around for several years and are nearly always near the top of any maker’s would-love-to-do list. Instructions for this can be found previous post.Īlexa and MagicMirror will then run simultaneously on the same raspberry pi (at about 25 - 50% CPU).Ĭongratulations, now you've got a smart mirror, and maybe a personal assistant! Have fun never looking at your smart phone again. This can be done by installing and running Alexa on your raspberry pi as well. If you've already got a computer on your wall, you may as well add some voice interaction. There are also some additional configuration details regarding screen orientation, screensaver settings, and wifi. To edit this, navigate to the MagicMirror/config/config.js file and add custom location, calenders, moldules, etc. This should show the default mirror dashboard which you will immediately want to customize. If these ran successfully, you can just navigate to the MagicMirror directory, and run npm start Then I downloaded and installed magic mirror using: There is a guide on the website to install MagicMirror, but it didn't entirely work for me.įirst I had to update NodeJs and electron by running the following commands:Ĭurl -sL - Node.js v4 LTS "Argon" | sudo bash. With the basic setup done, we will now install the core application called MagicMirror. This lets you work remotely once you've finished the initial setup, without plugging in a keyboard and mouse. You should also follow these steps to enable VNC Viewer, a remote desktop tool that allows to you access your RPi desktop from any computer on the same network. Once the Pi starts up, run the following in terminal to get the software up to date: I strongly recommend raspbian jessie, which already has a great install guide. Of course the first step is just getting an operating system. So you've built your hardware! That's awesome, now it's time to get the raspberry pi running the MagicMirror and Alexa software. If there are loose monitor controls, cover the exposed backside of the circuit board with electrical tape, and tape it to the back of your monitor. Start by removing the monitors bezel by removing screws and jabbing a knife or paint scraper in the seam of the monitor. The goal here is to get 4 pieces of wood around your monitor. Step 2: Building the Wood Monitor Enclosure You're done! Let it sit for a while before moving, as it hasn't really stuck in place until all the soap mixture dries.
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