Read the statement by Michael Teeuw here.
Seymour — my modern take on the 3Com Audrey
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I’ve been working on a small ambient information appliance called Seymour.
The inspiration is the original 3Com Audrey internet appliance. Seymour is built around a Raspberry Pi, a 7-inch touchscreen, a rotary encoder, an illuminated WLED ring, an internal speaker, and a 3D-printed enclosure. I chose MagicMirror because its module ecosystem already provides most of the useful building blocks.
Instead of presenting everything as one dashboard, Seymour organizes modules into channels. Pressing the encoder opens the channel selector, rotating chooses a channel, and pressing again opens it. The touchscreen is also available.
The current prototype includes clock, weather, news, calendar, messages, a kitchen timer, and local music playback through Music Assistant. The LED ring provides status and attention feedback, while the speaker handles music and timer sounds.
It is still a working prototype, although it may already be close to the finished personal appliance I wanted. I’m continuing to polish the documentation and software before making the repositories public.
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A quick follow-up with some well-deserved acknowledgements.
Seymour may look like a standalone appliance, but it was made possible by the MagicMirror community and its wonderfully reusable ecosystem. Much of the project has been about connecting existing modules into a cohesive experience rather than reinventing everything from scratch.
Special thanks to:
Edward Shen for MMM-pages, which provides the underlying page and channel system.
Tom Hirschberger for MMM-GPIO-Notifications, which connects Seymour’s rotary encoder to MagicMirror.
Jopyth and contributors for MMM-Remote-Control, which makes remote administration and updates easier.
shbatm for projects including MMM-KeyBindings and MMM-RTSPStream.
MMRIZE for MMM-CalendarExt3 and MMM-CalendarExt3Agenda.The MagicMirror team and every module author whose work helped turn this experiment into a functioning appliance.
Seymour also builds on WLED, Home Assistant, and Raspberry Pi—another reminder of how much becomes possible when open-source projects are designed to work together.
I have added a few pieces for the Audrey experience, including the timer, centralized messages, themes, channel navigation, and LED attention behavior. But Seymour’s foundation belongs to the broader community.
Thank you to everyone who created, maintained, documented, tested, or answered questions about these projects. Seymour would not exist without your work.
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Wow, that’s cool! I’d love to see more of that 👏
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