Making My Bedroom Mirror Smarter

Posted On Dec 14, 2019 К администратор С Комментарии отключены

Having a’ smart’ home is starting to become the trend these days; I’ve seen a moderately significant increase in the liberate of commodities aimed at starting daytime to daylight duties more efficient, saving you coin and generally attaining your life easier.

So a little while ago I started looking into the concept of’ smart-alecky mirrors’; a handy piece of tech that can construct your mornings a lot easier. Whilst getting ready you can have any piece of information available at a glance. No need to get out your telephone to check your planned for the working day or to find out whether you need to take an umbrella with you!

Overall it made me a few weeks to get this far, but this is by no means a finished arise 😛 TAGEND home Credit to Max Braun for the UI inspiration.

On the left hand side you can see the current weather forecast and flood likelihood, along with my currently frisking way on Spotify underneath. To the title I am displaying the time, appointment and my personal calendar from Google.

Raspberry Pi Building the Mirror

The concept is actually pretty simple — a two-way mirror with a display on the rear surface of it. As the mirror is slightly transparent, light can be projected through the glass to the front side, giving the impression that the information is directly inside the mirror’s glass. Pretty cool right?

The Mirror

To start with, I needed to find myself the rectify type of mirror for the number of jobs. I knew that I needed something that was easy to mount and manage.

smart home The first example, find the bia on the line of the wall?

My first attempt was using an acrylic part of two-way mirror, which was somewhat of a flop due to the structural qualities of acrylic, yielding a similar visual gist as to what you’d see in a funhouse.

I decided to bite the bullet to ditch acrylic for glass; it won’t distort and doesn’t scratch or label as readily for purposes of comparison. After a bit of studies I settled on Pilkington’s MirroView( tm) commodity, purported purely towards digital mirror exposes; I opted for the 70/20 variant for darker lighted rooms.

The Display

Originally my campaign started because I had an old-fashioned 21.5 ” LCD monitor laying around that I had no use for, feeling it would be perfect for this application. I was wrong. The consider tilts were horrid and the backlight bleed was clearly noticeable.

smart-mirror You can see how the verse starts to disappear in places and that the pitch-black background is fairly patchy towards the edges of the screen.

After a little bit of research, I decided to go with a VA panel, these often have better ending angles and a much higher contrast ratio than the TN panel I attempted to use. The reality there is a screen behind the reflect is now almost unnoticeable to the untrained eye.

I settled on the BenQ GW2270HM, which I snagged for a pretty good price on eBay. It also has built-in orators which gives me a few ideas for the future..

technology The brand-new flaunt is almost perfect, textbook is a lot sharper and differentiate is significantly better. The only step-up would be moving to an OLED.The Hardware

I aimed to build something reliable and simple to maintain, so I went out and picked up a Raspberry Pi 4. This would allow me to run almost any type of OS for managing the UI.

home Also a few other goodies including a snazzy mesh-style casing.The UI

I started off by using the open-source MagicMirror2 software by Michael Teeuw, but instantly opted to challenge myself to build my own software with my own take on the UI.

I chose to build the software using the popular React entanglement frame by facebook. Meaning I can easily flow the software up in a full-screen browser window, taking a similar approaching to the latter via PM2.

For the climate I expended the API offered by Dark Sky, allowing me to get detailed info on the weather by location.

As for the other areas I abused Spotify’s Web API for going the currently playing track, Moment.js for exposing the time, and a practice implementation for the calendar utilizing the ical.js Node library.

I plan on making the source-code available at some point too!

Piecing It All Together

Originally I craved something to mount to the wall inside a illusion wooden formulate like most — but I had a better idea.

I started off by making a cutout in the door of my wardrobe for the display to be organized within. Using some old off-cuts I supplemented a supporting centre strut, applying Gorilla tape to hold the screen in place. It’s a bit rudimentary, but hey — it does the job.

I consumed a cut of white hardboard to cover up the mess, acquiring cutouts to feed through the two presentation cables and using double-sided tape to hold it in place. After this, I going to be able connect the controller council back up and organize it to the back of the door.

Raspberry Pi smart home smart-mirror Making a mess of my newly obtained IKEA PAX outfit. At some place I’ll probably decorate the silver-tongued specimen to competitor too.

To keep it as tidy as is practicable, I moved some trunking across and down to the floor of the cupboard. From now both the HDMI and power cables route across into the back of a shelved domain, where the Pi is; so it’s all hidden away.

technology home

Now that we’ve crossed the party at the back, let’s get to the business up front.

As the screen is only a portion of the mirror itself, I needed the respite to function as a regular reflect. To do this I chipped a piece of pitch-black card to fill in the blank space, with a cutout for the flaunt. Then it was finally time to mount the mirror itself.

Raspberry Pi smart home Not extremely shabby, eh?

When I had the reflect chipped to size, I opted to additionally have 4 pre-drilled openings for attaching; allowing me to sandwich the mirror against everything else securely.

What’s Next?

As mentioned previously in the article, this is nowhere near the end of the project. I have quite a few ideas to implement over the course of the next year or two. The first being some sort of voice assistant, Alexa или Google Assistant, determining expend of the screen’s built-in speakers.

Currently I have to manually turn the display on and off, so naming it up on some sort of timer would be useful, or maybe even controlling it externally as a’ smart’ device via Google Home?

Lastly, another interesting feature to try would be facial acknowledgment or motion observation. Meaning the mirror can expose minimal or no information until person stands in front of it. Facial approval would also mean I can expose relevant info based on the individual.

Conclusion

So far I’ve truly experienced this little project and will continue to post more as I implement more boasts. In periods of pricing it have recently expenditure me in areas of PS200-250, which comparatively isn’t that bad to premade offerings.

smart-mirror technology Raspberry Pi

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and any other suggestions or improvements I could see? Thanks for reading!

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