Having difficulty starting my mirror. I really need some help

mcirim

I am realizing I am way outside of my depth and my father told me to leverage this forum. I am a middle school student trying to make a mirror for a school project.

I have found a pi 3 version b I got off craigslist. I have downloaded the mirror os and written it to the sd card. I have successfully booted and logged into the system but I can not get the mirror to start and I am finding it difficult to traverse the documents and dont understand how it works. Can someone assist me and give me specific instructions on how to start it and configure a few modules? I am stuck and am ashamed to tell you how much time I have spent working on this. I feel so stupid. Please help me. I am desperate. I could pay someone a moderate amount of money from my babysitting money. I dont have much. But I know everyone’s time is valuable. Please help

sdetweil

@mcirim @karsten13 can you help here

karsten13

@mcirim

I think you installed MagicMirrorOS, this is not a simple setup because it uses container images to start the mirror.

If so, log in and execute the following commands line by line and post the output here.

uname -a

df

# following line only moves to another dir without any output:
cd /opt/mm/run

docker compose config

docker logs labwc

docker logs mm

KristjanESPERANTO

@mcirim Why did you choose mirror os? I think, it would be easier to use the normal Raspberry Pi OS and install MagicMirror the “standard way”.

sdetweil

@KristjanESPERANTO mmos is just raspi os with MagicMirror in docker

Should be simple, flash and boot

KristjanESPERANTO

@sdetweil Sure, it’s nice solution. But docker makes it a bit more difficult to troubleshot. If a new user takes the standard way, he probably would better understand how everything works and find the step where it fails.

sdetweil

@KristjanESPERANTO I understand and agree 100%,
You are preaching to the choir!!

There are SO many little things to make and maintain a running system
Even pm2 gets in the way
Shell scripts
Environment variables
Case sensitivity
Shell commands
Piping
Editor ui
Keyboard key mappings
Js and json file structures and syntax
Not to mention all the OS and display orientation details and constant changes

And we haven’t even talked about modules, install, update, hardware interaction(gpio) . API dependencies ,

Nor solution design, putting it all together (and mounting the thing)!

Docker should be the last mile AFTER you got all this under control.

But it’s provided and is a ‘quick’ ‘win’ to get base up and running.

sdetweil

@KristjanESPERANTO the system skills of users is not changing for the better. AI has made sure of that.

but that is why i keep up the installer, upgrade, backup/restore, MMM-Config…

make onboarding success easier and repeatable.

yes, the downstream effects are still trouble (debug, final composition, styling…)
but those were tough anyhow… and there is no simple, one thing fixes all.