Raspberry Pi Zero W for Magic Mirror

capedbuffethero

@davidgagne Wow, your summary above is just amazing! This is exactly what I was looking for.

Can you comment on why the choice of legacy OS was selected? Is there some kind of tradeoff that is being made here?

sdetweil

@capedbuffethero the pi0 is older armv6l processor, it can only run 32 bit mode. the memory is small on pi0,

everything that doesn’t fit in memory causes swapping, to the sd card. pi0 has the older slower sd chip.

so, use the legacy 32 bit image to reduce the footprint

davidgagne

@capedbuffethero Thanks! Please upvote if you found it valuable. I’m fairly new here and trying to improve my rep so all my posts aren’t held for moderation. :)

capedbuffethero

@davidgagne It appears I need 1 reputation to upvote.

sdetweil

@capedbuffethero really? I’ll check on that. didn’t used to be.

sdetweil

@capedbuffethero can you try this again… we should have reset this option to 0
downvote still requires rep of 1 or above…

plainbroke

@davidgagne
Does it matter that you install firefox-esr
but in the mm.sh script you just call it firefox ?
I went to midori to get mine to work it would not recognize the firefox in mm.sh for some reason.

sdetweil

@plainbroke the package is called firefox-esr

the program name is firefox
it must be on the path for mm.sh to execute it.
I don’t know if installing the package does that.
I don’t remember worrying about it

the command

which firefox
should return the full path to the executable if it’s on the path.
otherwise you can add its folder onto the path in the .profile or .bashrc scripts
that setup the shell environment

capedbuffethero

@davidgagne said in Raspberry Pi Zero W for Magic Mirror:

Summary

when running DISPLAY=:0 npm start I got an unexpected error
follow up question: export external_browser=firefox doesn’t this export vanish as soon as my session ends? Do I have to do this every time?
firefox is started and is visible on VNC
firefox is not able to connect to the node server (I guess the node server is not running)

Details:
When executing this script:

cd ~/MagicMirror
export external_browser=firefox
DISPLAY=:0 npm start

on this step: I get this output:

myname@raspberrypi:~ $ cd ~/MagicMirror
myname@raspberrypi:~/MagicMirror $ export external_browser=firefox
myname@raspberrypi:~/MagicMirror $ DISPLAY=:0 npm start

> magicmirror@2.27.0 start
> ./run-start.sh $1

./run-start.sh: line 79:  8050 Killed                  node serveronly

these are the lines that precede line 79:

    # if user explicitly configured to run server only (no ui local)
    # OR there is no xwindows running, so no support for browser graphics
    if [ "$serveronly." == "$true." ] || [ "$xorg." == "." -a $mac != 'Darwin' -a "$wait_for_x." != "." ]; then
      # start server mode,
      node serveronly
    else
      # start the server in the background
      # wait for server to be ready
      # need bash for this
      exec 3< <(node serveronly)

if we do export external_browser doesn’t that vanish as soon as the RPI is rebooted or if my session ends?

after a while the VNC client showed firefox start, but no URL, then the screen went white, then Firefox said “Unable to connect”

then I ran this script, I am tailing logs. What does “fix 'em up” script do

Execute fix'em-up script:

bash -c "$(curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sdetweil/MagicMirror_scripts/master/fixuppm2.sh)"

the last line is this: pm2 setup completed - Fri Jun 14 21:52:48 PDT 2024

cancelling the step DISPLAY=:0 npm start allows me to rerun this step, but the step always ends in failure.

UPDATE: “Unable to connect” is because Firefox cannot connect to the node server. VNC can connect without issue! The error is actually an error from the Firefox browser.

sdetweil

@capedbuffethero
the export is used on the MagicMirror system side. it is paired with the
node server execution, which launches MagicMirror without a ui.
then when the server is running, run-start.sh launches a browser to connect to the server

the export has nothing to do with vnc,
it is just used to tell run-start.sh which browser to launch. (on linux, env variables are NOT passed to children processes by default. you have to use the export keyword to enable it, for each env var you want to pass)

if you set the MagicMirror config.js.js to

address:"0.0.0.0",
ipWhitelist:[],

then you can use a browser on your phone, Windows, Linux, or Mac system to view MagicMirror directly without vnc

the killed message is because you restarted MagicMirror, and run-start.sh found the server instance running already. so it must be stopped and restarted in case you changed the config