Waveshare Magic Mirror touch screen

MM-Hans

I ordered the display and my first experience is that it looks neat (not a toy) but points 1-4 above remain a concern. An additional problem is that once hung up, the buttons for the on-screen display are no longer accessible.

The RPi desktop (OS with recommended software) is unusable slow, no idea what the reason is. However, working via SSH is good and fast.

The installation instructions for MM on the Waveshare WiKi did not work for me. I used their monitor settings and the sound card driver and installed MM further as described in the online MagicMirror² Documentation. Thereafter MM works as expected.

The monitor was delivered without a manual and something did not work properly with the onscreen display. I asked a question about this via the support address on the Waveshare site but never got an answer. After an email to sales it turned out that the address was no longer correct and I had to email support02@waveshare.com. I did but I’m still waiting for an answer … That seems to take way too long and until then I can’t do anything with the monitor :-(

cyberphox

Is it an actual 2 way mirror finish or just a touchscreen monitor?

MM-Hans

@cyberphox

Maybe I don’t understand you well, but it’s a one-way mirror over a touchscreen. I believe this monitor is also sold without the mirror. There is some space between the mirror and the display. I have not yet used the touch function because I will not be able to continue until I have an answer from Waveshare support.

aprilmaccydee

Just got one of these today, kinda happy with it, especially as a bit of a beginner system!

FYI - if you want to programmatically change the brightness (as I’m seeing in older posts):

CAUTION - This worked for me, but involves enabling scary flags and setting potentially unsafe values to the monitor. Exercise caution.

Edit vi /boot/config.txt
Add:

dtparam=i2c2_iknowwhatimdoing

Reboot

Then sudo apt-get install ddcutil

Run sudo ddcutil detect
You should see an output like:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo ddcutil detect
Display 1
   I2C bus:             /dev/i2c-2
   EDID synopsis:
      Mfg id:           RTK
      Model:            RTK FHD
      Serial number:    [redacted]
      Manufacture year: 2011
      EDID version:     1.3
   VCP version:         2.2

If you do, you can then run:
sudo ddcutil getvcp 10 to get the brightness
and
sudo ddcutil setvcp 10 [1-100] to set the brightness, where 1-100 is the desired value of the brightness

jrettsch

@aprilmaccydee

Thanks for this example! I got the Waveshare Magic Mirror a few days ago and was looking for a solution to dim the backlight.

I’m using xscreensaver to blank the screen after 2 minutes and used the ddcutil command to dim the backlight.

Here is the script I’m using:

#!/bin/sh
process() {
        while read line; do
                case "$line" in
                        UNBLANK*)
                                sudo ddcutil setvcp 10  100
                        ;;
                        BLANK*)
                                sudo ddcutil setvcp 10  1
                        ;;
                esac
        done
}

xscreensaver-command -watch | process

I use xscreensaver-command -watch to get the state changes, see https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/man3.html