Raspberry Pi Zero W for Magic Mirror

[davidgagne]

@sdetweil Right. That’s my confusion. I have been able to run the script a dozen (or more) times on the Zero W, but it always fails on the 3B+, which I had assumed would be faster / better than the Zero W.

[sdetweil]

@davidgagne always fails?

what os? I’d pick the 32 it due to memory size

send me the install.log.

[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

[funkdafied]

Hello all giving MM a try again on a Rpi zero and have been trying to run the script in this thread but keeping getting the following message

Am I missing something to by pass the Xorg check?

OS
achild@raspberrypi:~ $ cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME=“Raspbian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)”
NAME=“Raspbian GNU/Linux”
VERSION_ID=“12”
VERSION=“12 (bookworm)”
VERSION_CODENAME=bookworm
ID=raspbian
ID_LIKE=debian
HOME_URL=“http://www.raspbian.org/”
SUPPORT_URL=“http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianForums”

[sdetweil]

@funkdafied I have just pushed a fix for that… (was a test for text mode or graphical mode)
(and I see I have to expand the test for the Bookworm compositor too,edit: just fixed that too)

but it won’t help in your situation…

you cannot run MagicMirror on bookworm successfully on a pi0-w, armv6l
takes too much memory

you need to use the legacy 32 bit image (bullseye)

[funkdafied]

@sdetweil thank you that worked to a point please have a look at the below with the errors I getting:

[sdetweil]

@funkdafied I cannot recreate this…

try this to increase the timeout

You can extend timeout with those two commands:

npm config set fetch-retry-maxtimeout 6000000
npm config set fetch-retry-mintimeout 1000000
enter image description here

Source: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v9/using-npm/config#fetch-retry-maxtimeout

[funkdafied]

@sdetweil Thank you that did the trick. Only issue I see to be running into at the moment is Midori telling me it can’t find the page it is looking for.

[sdetweil]

@funkdafied ok,

when you run on a device that doesn’t have electron support, it doesn’t get installed via MM as expected…

then my install script changes the startup to use my run-start.sh script

which launches MagicMirror in server mode
and waits for the ready message

>>>   Ready to go! Please point your browser to: http://0.0.0.0:8080   <<<

and then launches midori like this (with whatever the port number is in the message)

midori http://localhost:8080 -e Fullscreen -e Navigationbar

just for grins can you do

cd ~/MagicMirror
npm start server

to see if that message appears

[sdetweil]

@funkdafied I think we solved this on discord

[Mayank Arora]

@sdetweil

I made a magic mirror in my college time using Raspberry pi 3b+

Integrated google assistant with youtube play also in it.

Now i am graduated and doing job from past 2 years, i am thinking to build one for my home.

Raspberry pi 4 and 5 are expensive, does raspberry pi zero works?

Will google assistant work on it? And youtube also will work on it?

If not youtube, will spotify work on it using pi zero

Which raspberry pi zero will you recommend me