Read the statement by Michael Teeuw here.
Mirror for a Charity Auction
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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke
Many years ago, I went to a very small school and I’ve stayed in touch with most of the people from that class. One of my friends is now a parent with kids in that same school and heavily involved with the PTA, school clubs, etc. Each year, they host an auction to raise funds for the school sports & drama programs and she asked if I could donate a magic mirror for the auction. So I came up with this:
The theme is the use of technology to give the appearance of magic. The left side of the face has various equations & graphs, while the right size has some wiccan & magic symbols. The words are carved with my CNC and filled with a 2-part resin with metallic pigment.
It’s running on an RPI4 with the camera module and a PIR sensor built into the frame. There are 300 neopixels running around the back side of the frame, but I didn’t quite have time to get that part of the mirror working before the auction. It has my reverse SSH code on it, so I can get into it remotely now that it’s been auctioned off.
Honestly, there are several things I would do differently if I had more time (I’m a terrible procrastinator). It needs engravings on the top & bottom pieces of the facing frame, not just the sides. And the pigment for the words should be darker, I think. If I can convince them to give it back to me for a couple weeks, I may be able to redo the frame properly. And I really need to buckle down and get the neopixels working properly.
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Great :-)
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Awesome! Hope it fetches a high price!
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Outstanding. Love the CNC skills.
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That looks amazing :)
@bhepler said in Mirror for a Charity Auction:
It has my reverse SSH code on it, so I can get into it remotely now that it’s been auctioned off.
I don’t really understand reverse SSH. Does it let you connect if you don’t know the remote IP address? I’m looking at setting up a mirror for my mother in law, and if she changes ISP, the IP address will change. She’s not technical enough to be able to find the new one and let me know.
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@Tippon Yeah, that’s pretty much it. The mirror attempts to connect to my command & control server at DNS entry that I control. When it connects, it establishes a reverse SSH connection. I can ride that reverse SSH connection down into the mirror. The C&C server is cloud based, so I just turn it off whenever I don’t need to connect to the mirrors.
Because it’s the mirror making the outgoing connection, firewalls let it pass by. All the mirror needs is a connection to the internet.
I have a pretty long tutorial on how to set it up. I’m a bit verbose.
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@bhepler one can also use cloudflare to create a tunnel, (using a docker container on the device to do the inbound connect)
cloudflare allow you to create an uri that gets mapped to a local address and port…
I have ssh and vnc access to my systems thru this
ha.xxx.yyy gives me the HomeAssistant home page
ssh.xxx.yyy gives me ssh
vnc.xxx.yyy gives me vnc
fb.xxx.yyy gives me the file browser
i’ve got different uris to different systems.then u can use https: from the user browser to the cloudflare uri, and then the tunnel…
you can use other docker tools (filebrowser, …) to give access to different services…
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@sdetweil Now this sounds interesting. Do you have tutorial or URL where I can learn how to set this up?
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@bhepler That’s brilliant, thank you :)
I’ve got some homework to do :D
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@sdetweil Does that give you SSH access to the server you’re running everything on as well as other devices on your network?
I’m currently looking into changing my server OS and putting everything into containers, and then reorganising my network to make everything easier to access, so I’m trying to get everything right from the start :)
