A couple of hopefully easy "how to's"

motdog

So the mirror I’ve finally got working the way I want is a graduation gift for a friend’s kid. When she gets to school the dorm has wifi for the floor. How can she access the pi to change the wifi network so the mirror works. I’m guessing via ethernet? Probably on a MacBook.

Once set up is there a way for me to ssh in from my place to add university calendar to the mirror? Don’t really trust her to do so. I guess maybe a screen share and then use vnc from her laptop or is there a better way.

Thanks all!

sdetweil

@motdog 1st is a challenge. need a network, to have a network, to change the network…
this is what the wps button is supposed to do, but not in college rooms… with ethernet cord, you could add a module to display the ip address, and disable it after u config…

second, use teamviewer to connect, take console on her machine… then ssh into pi, nano to change config…

bhepler

Your friend’s kid should be able to change the WiFi network easily enough. You will probably want to sit down with her and walk through the steps once or twice just to be sure. It’s pretty simple:

Plug a mouse & keyboard into the Pi. I like the mini wireless keyboard & trackpad devices for this purpose.
Once the Pi has finished booting, press Ctrl+q to close the app. If you’re using PM2, it will try to restart it so you’ll want to turn that off temporarily by pressing Ctrl+Alt+t to open a terminal window and pm2 stop all to stop pm2 from restarting the Magic Mirror interface.
In the upper right corner is the WiFi symbol. Right-click on that (yay mouse!) and then select the target network. Log in to the network like a normal person.
Test your connection to be sure you can see the internet. Pro tip: if you don’t want to wait for the Chromium browser to load, you can enter curl ipinfo.io/ip to test your connection. If you get anything other than an IP address in return, you need to troubleshoot your connection.
Once you are connected, you should be able to enter pm2 start all to get the mirror interface back. This should survive a reboot.

To your 2nd question: Probably not. Any university worth its salt will have an enterprise-level gateway in place that will prevent inbound connections without some custom configuration. I would look into a reverse SSH connection. That would be a command that she would enter into the terminal that would establish an SSH connection to your network. You could then use that connection to make changes to her Pi.

I’m working on this right now, in fact. Hit me up in April and I should have procedures for you.

motdog

@bhepler Thanks. Will do. I don’t know if she will have a mouse/keyboard but Im sure I can find one at goodwill for a few bucks.