Thursday, May 7, 2020

Enginursday: A Raspberry Pi-based Magic Mirror

I don't know about anyone else, but after however many weeks in quarantine, I started losing track of time. We missed trash day, online class meetings and grocery pickups, because none of us knew what day it was. My husband made an off-hand comment that we needed a "battle station," I happened to have a Raspberry Pi in my hand, and...


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We love us some open source here at SparkFun, and I wanted this project to fit into our ethos. Enter Magic Mirror, an open source, Raspberry Pi-based smart mirror platform perfect for what I have in mind. It has a bunch of ready-made modules, and an ongoing list of third-party modules you can incorporate.

Phase one encompasses getting set up and the basics displayed. To get started, I plugged in my Raspberry Pi 3B+, added a screen and a wireless keyboard and mouse, and updated my Raspbian image to the latest via this tutorial.

Once I had Raspbian installed, I brought up a terminal on the Pi desktop and installed Magic Mirror. Their website has some great documentation for walking you through the process.

Right off the bat I had a date and the weather. After some futzing about, I was able to install a third-party module for my Google calendars and set those up front and center. I also found modules for the Word of the Day (because learning) and drink recipes (because it's five o'clock somewhere).

So this is the screen that now greets me when I sit down to drink my morning coffee:

phase 1

Getting this up and running was actually fairly simple. I had to poke through the forums a bit on a couple of things, but otherwise I am quite pleased with this initial pass. Phase two will likely involve a more complicated layout with calendar customization, Google to-do tasks listed, and possibly the "mirror" part of the Magic Mirror.

What projects are you doing to keep yourself on top of things? Let us know in the comments!

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