Smart Mirror

This is the web front end for my smart mirror that I built. It displays information such as time to work with traffic, top news stories and the weather forecast.

Create your own Smart Mirror

Equipment

• Raspberry Pi
• Computer monitor
• Two-way mirror

Monitor Setup

Diassemble the frame for your computer monitor and hook it up to your Raspberry Pi. Then place the two way mirror on top of your monitor. I used a lightweight acryllic two way mirror and taped it to the monitor. Mount the monitor on to the wall using a wall mount.

Raspberry Pi Setup

The setup for the Raspberry Pi is heavily inspired from here

1. Install Raspbian Debian Wheezy and download this repository somewhere to your Pi

2. Setup configuration using sudo raspi-config

• Update the Raspi config tool (Advanced Options)
• Enable SSH
• Disable overscan (Advanced Options)
• Memory Split (Advanced Options)

3. Connect to your Raspberry Pi using SSH or use terminal and run the following

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

4. Install Firefox (Iceweasel), Gnash, x11 server utils, matchbox, xautomation and unclutter (hide the cursor from the screen)

sudo apt-get install iceweasel gnash gnash-common browser-plugin-gnash x11-xserver-utils matchbox xautomation unclutter

5. Create the start-up script using

nano /home/pi/fullscreen.sh

You'll need to create a URL for your web browser to point to. The front-end retrieves your information from the URL. You'll need to know your latitude and longitude of where you'll setup the mirror and the latitude and longitude of your workplace if you want to also add time to work. You can use Google Maps to look up the longitude and latitude of locations.

You URL should look similar to this.

file:///C:/PATH/TO/YOUR/FRONT/END/index.html?name=YOUR_NAME&lat=YOUR_LATITUDE&lng=YOUR_LONGITUDE&worklat=YOUR_WORK_LATITUDE&worklng=YOUR_WORK_LONGITUDE&update=true

Your script should be as follows

unclutter &
matchbox-window-manager &
iceweasel "YOUR URL" --display=:0 &
sleep 15s;
xte "key F11" -x:0

Change the file mode using

sudo chmod 755 /home/pi/fullscreen.sh

6. Edit the autostart file to invoke your script

Edit the autostart file to run the script:

The file should look like this

@xset s off
@xset -dpms
@xset s noblank
@/home/pi/fullscreen.sh

7. Auto StartX (Run LXDE)

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

Scroll to the bottom and add the folowing above exit 0:

su -l pi -c startx

8. Start up Firefox (Iceweasel), go to settings and configure the following

• Disable history
• Disable start page

9. If your monitor rotated vertically like mine you'll need to do the following

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

Set the display_rotate property accordingly

display_rotate=0 # Normal
display_rotate=1 # 90 degrees
display_rotate=2 # 180 degrees

10. Restart your Pi. It should automatically open up your the browser and load up the web frontend.