Magic Mirror build

samuelellis · June 25, 2018

This is not fully a PC build but its something ive wanted to do for a while and as it is is a build log this seemed the best place for it, make my own Magic Mirror - if you havent seen these before then you can find examples on youtube, you basically get a two way mirror and mount it infront of a screen so the text can shine through. You can get some software for the RaspberryPi that runs this so here we go.

This project is only just starting so its going to be a big wall of text before I get some real updates

Step1 - Get a screen. I had a family member throwing this 32inch TV out as it was only 720p and they had just upgraded. The screen works perfectly so i thought its a shame to see it end up as e-waste.

In the picture below I have it connected to the Pi and as you can see the software works, I will have it setup to show me Date/Time, hourly NASA image, when the bus my partner takes to work arrives, when I need to set off to get to work with the latest traffic updates and a weather forecast

Step2 - get the back off the screen and see what we are working with, as this is an older TV it uses cold cathodes to backlight instead of LED's so its not going to be the thinest but the case is massive, Whipping the back off shows me the following

This makes life easy as the driver for the cold cathodes is on the left, power supply is on the right and the actual panel controller and source selector are all on one card with a daughterboard added onto it under the shelding

Step3 - After a bit of time I stripped out what looks like it was was not needed to keep the TV working

-Common interface slot for PPV TV

-Side panel Inputs

-Speakers

-Power switch and function buttons

-Some shielding

-Speakers

-Stand

Now in order to try and thin it down a bit more I need to do something about the power supply board and the control board - as you can see they are sat quite proud from the back of the screen

What i am planning to do is 3d print some plastic that has mounts for the holes on it so I can attach the boards directly to the back of the screen - should should give me about 1/2an inch extra room to play with once I have removed the then redundant metal work, I am guessing the reason Samsung didnt do this is heat but as the tv will be on for a max of 5mins i will probably get away with it - Im currently giving it some time before i poke around with it again so that big beefy capacitor can loose any stored charge but licking round the screen it looks like its attached to the front plastic with a metal frame so I should be able to just uplift that out and mount it into a new frame. Im torn on what aesthetic i want to go with, At the moment its either going to smooth and modern or steampunk

So while that is being worked on - The Pi, how did I configure that

The Pi is just a standard Raspberry Pi3b running a standard copy of Raspbian OS

The software for Magicmirror can be found at the following url https:\\magicmirror.builders - This site gives you a single command to install the software, the command is -

Run that from a command line and it will go away and do what it needs to do, when it asks if you want to auto-start magic mirror at this point I would say no as you have extra config that it needs to do

I have added the following extra packages to my install

-MMM Nasa for the space picture

-MMM-Traffic - this allows me to set what time I need to be at work for, where I work and where I live and it will pull the traffic stats from Google and give me a rough time to set off

-MMM-UKLiveBusStopInfo - this is for my parther, it shows when her bus will be arriving at the stop so she knows when she needs to set off.

As time goes on I will probably add more to it

Then if like me you want to run the screen in Portait mode you need to edit /boot/config.txt so it has the following line at the bottom of it

display_rotate=1

Then you need to reboot and the screen will be Portrait

Once this is done you will need to stop the screen saver turning the display off, change the power settings on the WiFi card so it doesnt sleep and auto-hide the mouse

To stop the screensaver kicking in from a command prompt run

sudo apt-get install xscreensaver

This will install the screensaver control panel so you can turn the screen saver off

To hide the mouse at a command prompt type

sudo apt-get install unclutter

Then when it is installed type sudo nano ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart

That will open the autostart file - at the end of the file enter the following - @unclutter -display :0 -idle 3 -root -noevents

That will hide the cursor after 3seconds of inactivity

Finally to turn the power save mode on the WiFi off enter the following at a command line

cat << EOF | sudo tee /etc/network/if-up.d/off-power-manager
#!/bin/sh
# off-power-manager - Disable the internal power manager of the (built-in) wlan0 device
iw dev wlan0 set power_save off
EOF

Then change the permissions and restart networking

sudo chmod 755 /etc/network/if-up.d/off-power-manager
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart