We’re back in the office after a brief break for a plague. So I got into the mirrors and uploaded some moving portrait videos.

First, the right side:
https://youtu.be/5647bHkcUw0

And on the left side:
https://youtu.be/HT6_DEtfaSc

The 2nd mirror I made was for my office using a really wide piece of one-way mirror that I had fall into my lap. After a lot of tribulations, I got it done. But I was never really happy with it. The mounting system was clunky, it hung away from the wall a lot, there was a huge dead space in the middle, I used two different processors for the monitors, power was via a concealed power strip mounted on the wall, etc.

I just finished upgrading the double-wide mirror to a triple-monitor setup. New frame, new facing, better mounting and a power plug that I highly recommend to anyone.

First, I build the support frame. I added a rabbit around the inside to hold the glass.

Next I built the facing out of chair rail molding. This is the same material as previous (the boss likes it).

After staining the facing, I joined the support frame to the facing. Eventually, the glass will sandwich between these two pieces. The metal L brackets are screwed in so that I can transport the entire thing as a unit and detach the pieces when it’s time to migrate the glass from the existing mirror to the new frame.

Next, I cut a hole for the power plug. I found these on Amazon. I did have to wait a couple weeks while they shipped from China, but I think they were worth the wait. No more inline switches on power cords!

The power port is wired into a power strip that I also bought off of Amazon. This will provide a place for the monitors and Pi to plug in. It just has enough slots. I’m using every AC and USB socket on this thing. I tried glueing it to the support frame but it didn’t work. I ended up zip tying it in place.

Quick testing to make sure I didn’t miswire anything. You can see some other steps here: the support frame has been painted black so it won’t show through the one way glass. The holes in the support frame for the power cords and USB cords have been drilled and the cords are threaded. The power cords were snipped in order to make it through the holes, so I reconnected those with some wire nuts. There are some pieces of scrap wood on the support frame that are screwed in with one screw. Those hold the monitor up against the glass so the monitor doesn’t slide out due to gravity. They’ll rotate into place one the monitors are in position up against the glass.

After testing, I took it to work and installed in over about 3 hours. I had someone in the office help me which was a lifesaver. It’s heavy! We took down the old mirror, disassembled it, moved the glass over to the new frame, screwed the facing on, flipped it over, removed the monitors from the old mirror, took off the bezels, installed them in the new mirror, took down the old VESA mounts, put up the new French cleats and then finally hung the mirror.

I went back today to configure it. I think it turned out really well!
https://youtu.be/A4nr88bGblI

And the mirror was a hit.

I’ll have more on this in the next couple of days. But here’s a preview just to whet your appetite.

Now that photos are working again, here are some photos of the refreshed Magic Mirror Mark II. All three screens are active and the look is much cleaner.

And a close up of the switch.

IIRC, @michmich looked into offering this as a commercial product and he ran into patent and licensing problems. The laws of your country may vary, but the short version is you can’t offer a magic mirror as a commercial product without involving lawyers and giving the patent holders some sort of payment.

You may be able to make one for your friends as a favor, with them picking up the expense of the materials. But you won’t be able to turn this into a business without careful and professional legal advice.

@skr Because I’m a crap coder in Javascript.

Sorry for not helping earlier, folks. I was at a wedding and delivering my mirror as a gift. I’ll investigate and see if I can’t improve the mirror code.

You should not ever have to modify the compliments.js file. You should be able to pull it off with just modifications to the config.js file.

I confess, after reading the name of the module I had a completely wrong impression of what it was going to do.

So this was an interesting project. I showed my first mirror to my boss and he was so impressed with it, he voluntold me to make one for the office. He gave me a budget and told me to complete it at my own pace. Other than “make it impressive” and “modern”, I was given more or less a free hand.

I considered mounting a 65" TV and doing it that way, but I had a piece of one-way glass fall into my lap. I figured it would be faster to use it than order a chunk of glass large enough to make that ginormous mirror. The trouble is… the glass is 88" x 15". It’s repurposed from a faux-fireplace thing that my neighbor is installing in his bathroom (don’t ask). So in the end, I decided that two monitors behind one glass would work. This way, there’s always a portion that is just reflection so people can primp.

So I started out by working out the mounting problem. With two monitors and a really long piece of mirror, I decided that I could keep the bezel on the monitors and use commercial wall mounts that attach to the VESA holes in the back of the monitor. The mirror hangs off of the monitors, instead of the frame supporting both the monitor and mirror.

First step: Route a rabbit into the frame so that the glass will sit flush with the face of the frame.

A quick coat of stain in case someone sees it from the side:

Paint the inside edges black to cut down on the visibility of the lighter edge through the glass:

A layer of window weather stripping goes in the rabbit to provide cushioning to for the glass, and also to push the glass up against the moulding.

Screw the moulding down over the glass and into the frame. The moulding is a fairly simple round over type, usually used for chair rails. I wrapped it in a vinyl wrap with a carbon fiber pattern.

I haven’t ever mounted anything in an office before. They don’t use wooden studs, so I was unsure how to mount this thing into the walls. On the building construction supervisor’s advice, I build a mounting plate out of pine. A quick pass with the router put a good edge on it, and a stain plus sealant gave it some color.

Time to install everything in the office! Here’s what it looks like beforehand:

The mount is up along with the monitor mounts attached to the mounting board.

Monitors, power strip, RasPi and Fitlet in place:

And finally, we hang the mirror over the top of the two monitors.

@seedhe - The module framework that @MichMich created is where the technique of hosting the mirror on a Pi really shines. While the Magic Mirror is more-or-less a customizable web page, the ability for the modules to call background processes adds a level of utility.

For example, I can put a static web page up on an Amazon cloud IP and just hit that from my mirror. It will display static data and maybe some things from various APIs, if I code it cleverly enough. But that’s about it.

With the OS working behind the scenes, I can display anything behind my firewall (IP cameras, weather stations, temperature sensors, PIR sensors, etc.). I can also plug in a camera and/or microphone and use the data from those devices in my modules.

It also allows you to scale up if you need to. A Raspi is pretty slick for its size and cost. But if you put something like a NUC behind it, you can use that processing power for some really cool features. Voice recognition, facial recognition, complex animations, etc.

@ike-9 - I had assumed that you used pm2 to start the Magic Mirror process. My bad. That’s an installation thing, so no need to introduce something new.

Hmm. Nothing in the logs, nothing in the console? That is bizarre. Let me fire this up and see if I can’t get it to work.

@ike-9 - Have you checked the logs?

From an SSH terminal connected to your mirror, enter pm2 log 0 and it should list the latest log entries for you. Look for any line that reads ERROR.

Presumably, the module will tell you when something goes wrong.

Another possibility is going to a framing store - one that will professionally frame portraits, photos, etc. Take your mirror glass with you and explain that you want a shadow box with the interior dimensions the same as the dimensions of the glass and a frame to match. The depth of the shadow box will be the depth of your monitor, plus 10mm or so for airflow.

They’ll do the custom work for you.

The only information that is unique to my mirror is the module configuration. I just back up the config.js file whenever I make a change to the mirror configuration. If the mirror needs to be rebuilt, I can quickly build a slick Buster installation, SSH into the Pi, run the installation script, drop the backup config.js to the config folder and then do a half-dozen git clone commands.

Once the mirror is up & running, I can do the boring maintenance stuff (apt get update && apt get upgrade) and just let it run in the background.

@ashishtank - It has been my experience that shutting off the power without shutting down the Pi will corrupt the SD card after about 18 months of daily hard shutoffs. Rebuilding the SD card with a backup config is about a 45 minute process by this point, most of it just waiting for the npm install routine to finish.

I have a lot of Pi laying about due to work, so I usually have 3-6 unconfigured Buster installations on SD cards on my desk. Run the installation script, copy the config.js file from backup, do a whole bunch of git clone commands and I’m off & running again. SD cards are cheap. Easy enough to have a spare card for the mirror ready to go.

(If you were really paranoid, you could have the spare SD card taped to the inside of your mirror. Corrupted card? Shutdown, swap, boot. Rebuild corrupted card during your spare time)

Yeah, what he said.

Tell you what. Read those two links and try to add the MMM-COVID19-SPARKLINE module. If you hit a snag, come back here and tell us what happened. We’ll get you sorted out.

You have a mirror and a plan for specifically what you want to see on the interface. You’re almost there and I don’t think you’re going to need much guidance.

Magic Mirror Basics, part 2: Modifying your mirror

You’ve already done this a bit, but I want to expand upon modifying the behavior of your Magic Mirror. The vast majority of the time, you will be able to change the behavior of your magic mirror to your will by doing two things:

• Installing modules in the /home/pi/MagicMirror/modules folder
• Modifying the config.js file.

You’ve already taken a crack at modifying the config.js file. You’ve changed the default compliments to include your wife’s name. That’s pretty much half of the journey right there. The compliments and calendar modules are included with the basic magic mirror framework, so you don’t need to add those modules separately. Adding the modules developed by the community is only slightly more involved.

The basic steps to adding a third-party module are:

• clone the module into the /home/pi/MagicMirror/modules folder
• run the installation script, if necessary
• edit the config.js file to tell the magic mirror framework to look for the new module.

The only complex part of the process is that the section of the config.js file for the new module isn’t included in the default file, so you’ll have to add it from scratch. It’s not terribly difficult and the read.me file in each module should give you an example of the relevant code to copy into the config.js file.

Magic Mirror Basics, part 1: Logging in remotely.

This usually means establishing a connection from your laptop or desktop to your magic mirror and using the command line to make changes to your magic mirror. Once you’ve built your mirror, it’s very inconvenient to make changes directly on the mirror. You have to plug a mouse & keyboard into the Pi which is usually buried behind the glass & frame. It’s much easier to establish a connection from your main computer to the Pi and use that to make changes.

Your goal here is to establish what’s called an SSH connection between your nice computer and the wimpy computer that drives the mirror. If you’re using Windows, I suggest downloading & installing Bitvise SSH on your main computer. This will ease the process of establishing the connections.

The Raspberry Pi has the capability to host SSH connections, but you need to tell it to turn this feature on. Plug a keyboard into your Raspberry Pi and press Ctrl + Alt + t (control, alt & tee). That will open up a window with command line access to your Raspberry Pi. Once you see the window with the command line, enter sudo raspi-config and press enter. You’ll see a very basic interface appear with some options. Use the arrow keys and the enter key to navigate down to Interfacing Options and press enter, then navigate to P2 SSH and press enter.

When it asks you if you want the SSH server to be enabled, make sure <Yes> is highlighted in red and then press enter. It will confirm your selection, then kick you back to the main menu. Use the TAB button to navigate to Finish and press enter. Your Pi is now ready to receive connections.

You will need to know your Raspberry Pi’s IP address so you know how to connect. Enter the following on the Pi’s command line: ip a | grep wlan0 and press enter. It will spit back two lines of text, the 2nd one should look like this:

inet 192.168.0.10/24 brd 10.0.0.255 scope global wlan0

That string of numbers after the word inet but before the /24 is what you’re looking for. In the above case, the IP address is 192.168.0.10. Yours may be different. Write it down, 'cuz you’ll need it.

On your main computer/laptop, open up Bitvise and create a new profile. Name it something easy, like “Magic Mirror” and save it to your desktop. In the Host text box, enter the IP address you just wrote down. The Port value is 22. Over on the right, the username box should contain pi. Initial method is “password”. Once you’re ready, click on “Log in” at the bottom of the Bitvise app and it will establish a connection to your Pi and ask you for a password. By default, the password is raspberry (assuming you didn’t change it).

It should automatically open two windows. The first will be a command line window. Congratulations! You have remotely logged in to your magic mirror. The other window is a file transfer window. You can use this to upload pictures, sound files, movies, etc. to your mirror (or download things too). The left side is your desktop/laptop and the right side is your mirror. You can copy either direction by dragging files & folders from one side to the other.

You now have remote access to your mirror.

Welcome to the community! Congratulations upon completion of your first magic mirror. We’ll get you hooked up.

Lots of information in your post, so I’m going to hit the highlights and break it into parts. Feel free to ignore my advice as I am frequently wrong.

• “Mirror booted up and everything works” - Dude, you are 90% of the way there. Even if you stopped work and just wrapped the thing, she’s going to love it.
• “I’m seeing people log in via remote and I know that I will have to install a module for that” - This can mean a couple things. There is a mobile app to configure a Magic Mirror via your smartphone. This is optional. There is another module (MMM-Remote-Control) that will let you restart or refresh your mirror or turn modules on/off. This is also optional. By far, most people log into their mirror via an SSH terminal. This does not require a module on your mirror. It requires a desktop computer and some free software. I happen to like BitVise SSH for Windows machines. We can walk you through logging in to your Magic Mirror remotely.
• “she will want to add her personal schedule to the MM” - Should not be a problem. First bit of information you will need to know is which calendar service does she use? This usually boils down to “Does she have an iPhone or an Android phone?” as they tie in to the two most popular calendar services.
• “COVID updates” - Also not a problem. We have a couple really nifty COVID-19 tracker modules available. I use MMM-COVID19-SPARKLINE and it works quite well.
• Pretty much everything else you mentioned is doable. See below for details.

I’ve found that chair rail molding is a good source for easy decorative front facing. It takes a stain well and the pattern is good for hiding nail heads and other imperfections.