I’d rather not talk about it, honestly. This is one of the few places that is tightly focused on its intended purpose. I really would like to keep it that way.

Although a module to track polls and/or election results would be kind of interesting.

In my experience, the technique used in the Complete Setup Tutorial no longer works as intended. In order to keep the mirror on all the time, I recommend the following:

• Install X-Screensaver by entering sudo apt-get install x-screensaver
• Turn off your MM briefly by clicking Alt-Q. (If you’re using PM2 to maintain the process, enter pm2 stop mm or whatever).
• Using a mouse, configure X-screensaver to not use a screensaver. I believe you can access the X-screensaver configuration interface by clicking on the Raspberry icon -> Preferences -> Screensaver. The drop-down to select the screensaver mode will have an option for “disable screen saver”.
• Close the configuration panel and then run your MagicMirror process normally.

Credit goes to @sgtwtf for this suggestion.

Looks good! Are you driving it with a Pi or something with more umph?

It looks like the power traces lengthwise along the strip. If you gently pop the monitor out of the frame, you can probably identify where the contacts are supposed to meet up on the side of the monitor.

You may be able to use a very small dab of hot glue in the middle to keep it in place. Or one of the industrial boogers from a credit card offer. Power should follow the trace, so even if it has to go out a half millimeter, it should still conduct. Hold it down when you put it back into the frame, naturally.

It also looks like you only need that one trace from group to group. You could try bridging the pads on the monitor with a scrap piece of wire and see if that gives you power to the last 3rd of the monitor. If it work, solder the wire in and see if that give you your monitor back.

@lolobyte He means Oshkosh, Wisconsin, USA.

You can stop them all at once by entering pm2 stop all

Nicely done! I love the happy surprise with the monitor LED. And good job with the heat sinks.

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.

@RE_Magic_Mirror That’s a bit more specific than we usually consider around here.

That 2nd variable, the transmittance visible, is usually about all we consider. I just bought a mirror that was also 11% transparent and it works great. It is maybe a little dim in a brightly lit reception area, but I’m certainly not going to send it back.

At most, you might want to go up to 20% transmittance, but I would use that only in areas that are in bright sunlight. For your typical household / interior mirror, I think you’re good to go with that mirror.

Okay, a couple things. sono.sh is your script that starts your process. ~ is the shortcut to the pi user’s home directory, also known as /home/pi. In order to run scripts from the command line, you have to precede the script name with ./

So let’s take a moment to verify the state of your pi. Change to the home directory and pull up the file list with a couple switches to see if sonos.sh exits:

pi@raspi:~ $ cd ~
pi@raspi:~ $ ls -lh sonos.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pi pi 26 April 15 11:50 sonos.sh

There will be some variation in your results. If you see the phrase “No such file or directory”, then the file does not exist at that location. Also, you may not have any “x” entries when you do see the file listed. If so, the file is not marked executable, so it won’t run. You can fix this by typing chmod +x sonos.sh

I’m a little unclear as to what commands exactly are in your sonos.sh file. Could you please enter cat sonos.sh and reply with the results?

Adding the script to pm2 is done by typing pm2 start sonos.sh. You can then verify that pm2 has picked it up by typing pm2 status all. That will give you a list of the processes that pm2 is controlling. You should see both your mm.sh process and your sonos.sh process.

Give that a go and report back to us.