I hot glued it all in place straight to the back of the monitor display - luckily didn’t damage it…įor the backing board to attach, I used the four mounting holes on the monitor as well as installing a few right angle brackets on the inside of the frame. Here’s the layout of the monitor, transformer, Pi, PIR and Fan: I used quick connecters to splice into the monitor’s power cable - don’t play with mains voltage if you don’t know what you’re doing. Also the 3A transformer was too thick to fit, so no choice really. I went for a 5V 2A output, which isn’t ideal for the Pi3B ( states is should have 2.5A+), but since I had no real peripherals to power, I hoped it would do. So I found a transformer for the job that would fit in the monitor cut outs. The monitor obviously takes mains voltage and I decided I didn’t want a separate power cable running up to the mirror carrying the 5V the Pi needs. I put the fan on top as I figured heat rises and it would be a good place to extract it. I first drilled a hole on the underside of the mirror for PIR (so it’s your legs & feet that trigger the mirror, but at least the sensor isn’t obviously visible) and then a series of small holes for the fan vent. Monitors can get warm after a while, so didn’t want to cook the Pi in a sealed, wooden crate. I wanted a little extra functionality on this mirror, so I added in a PIR motion sensor to switch the display off when no one was near it, and a small computer fan that would come on to cool the system if it got too hot. I needed some space behind the monitor so cut out some of the plastic backing with a circular saw on a dremel. As it’s wood, it can also be stained.įinally, I cut a backing board (I spray painted the edges black as was too impatient to stain) and the frame was pretty much done. Turns out, you can’t stain the edges of plywood, as the layers that are running perpendicular (the end cuts) will just messily absorb it, so I learnt about adhesive edging - a sort of strip of veneer that you iron on. I wanted a darked colour, so got out some old stain and painted it all. I glued this front panel edges and clamped for a few hours. This only really worked in wood as it was plywood, solid wood would most likely be too weak at the thin, tall edges. Finally gluing it together to make ‘neat’ corners.įor the front, it was easier to cut a sheet the size of the monitor and just cut out the hole where the mirror would sit (i.e. I wanted to try bevel cuts, so set the saw to 45deg and cut the ends into a wedge. The only saw I used for this was an electric jigsaw, so I cut strips for the edges first. I bought a sheet of 0.9mm plywood as it has a stainable hardwood layer on the outside and the perpendicular grain in each layer allows cutting it in any direction while maintaining strength. I like the idea of wood but have little experience - so this was a good chance to learn. As the monitor will appear diffuse the further away from the ‘mirror’ it is, I took the bezel off the monitor first.Ī quick test everything was visible with the ‘no signal’ splash. I then stuck it to the monitor with black electrical tape. The best and cheapest tool I know of to cut straight acyclic is a ‘scriber’ which is like a hooked blade that you score the plastic with until you can just snap it. So I started with cutting my acyclic to size for the monitor. So basically, you build a box to hold the monitor, stick the acyclic to it and then have a Pi at the back connected via HDMI. But glass will provide a much better, less distorted reflection. I used a piece of mirrored acrylic plastic from Amazon as it was about £15 instead of over a hundred for glass. This works in the smart mirror approach as we assume the monitor backlight will be the brightest thing in the frame. They simply allow the brighter room to be visible and the darker room to be mirrored. Contrary to popular belief, those mirrors in interrogation rooms are in fact two-way, not one-way. The mirror portion should be of the two-way variety. A pizero would also do, but can’t run the MagicMirror software itself and would need to serve it from an external server. I thought about using a Pi2, but I always had issues with WiFi dropout with a dongle, so the built in networking of the Pi3 was perfect. I have various old Pi’s lying around from old projects. This seemed the time to build the mirror to display some of this data, along with online sources (calendars, news, weather, etc.). With the advent of my home automation network, I now have nodes gathering thousands of datapoints for temperature, lights, power, motion events, etc. I first came across the Magic Mirror project years ago, where people were posting all kinds of these ‘smart mirrors’ online and fancied the idea, but didn’t have much data to populate it with until recently.
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