Hi all!

After a bit of work and quite some waiting, all pieces arrived and I gave an old notebook’s screen with a broken motherboard new life in the form of an informational screen just next to my frontdoor.

Before that, the requirements were that the screen had to be as unobstructive as possible so it had to be thin, and it had to look good on the wall as well, without any cables in sight. As a bonus, if it had the possibility to get a view of my living room it would be a nice touch.

The final result is this:
Final result

But first things first, I had to plan it first:

Planning

Cutting the slot for the screen

General shape

Butchering the door

Electronics

After some initial testing, I decided to paint the frame and insert the webcam:

Inserting webcam

Frontal view

After assembling everything, this was the end result:

Close-up of final result

Used hardware:

Some wood, black paint and quite some tools An old HP Pavillion DV6000 screen, which is actually a Samsung LTN154X3-L01 The corresponding driver and a 12v/5A PSU for it (way overkill but I’m pretending to use that same PSU for some other stuff in the future) rpi4 4GB

Software used:

Magic Mirror running via Docker (I want to install a magic mirror upstairs as well so it should use the same server. This pi also runs 15 other images as well, I don’t want to install anything on it except for Docker) Firefox-esr with an add-on that allows the browser to start up full screen. I tried Chromium in kiosk mode, but it displayed a message after a while stating that it couldn’t be updated. Didn’t want to spent more time in it, so went the easy way. To turn the screen on or off I wrote a small bash script and I used node-red for the actual programming of it. MQTT Home Assistant

Modules:

MMM-bustimes MMM-Buienradar MMM-BurnIn MMM-CalendarExt2 MMM-DailyAlarm MMM-IndoorTemperature-Endpoint MMM-RandomPhoto MMM-TomTomTrafficIncidents

Pending improvements:

Integrate MMM-MQTT into the monitor so that I can display some pieces of information directly on the screen Integrate MMM-iFrame or MMM-iFrame-Ping so that I can display some grafana graphics (I really like the gauge that Grafana produces) Integrate MMM-Pages Make another actual mirror which will be upstairs

I hope you liked this project as much as I enjoyed making it!

More photo’s and details can be found here: https://imgur.com/a/b3TcNSt

Modern 40” Magic Mirror First Try