I use one of these: NextGadget 3-Port USB Desk Charger. USB ports are powered strongly enough for the Pi, and it powers the monitor via the AC plug.

Only downside: the cord itself is only about 4 feet long. So if your mirror isn’t going right over an electrical outlet, you may have to wire in an extension cord yourself.

MMM-Selfieshot has been updated.

• The rotateCountdown parameter will allow you to rotate just the countdown and “shoot message”.
• The rotatePreview parameter will allow you to rotate just the display of the selfie.
• The rotation parameter has been removed.

A smart toothbrush? We truly do live in an age of wonders.

@sanaa1369 - The screen isn’t really locked, it’s just displaying the MagicMirror application in full screen. If you hit Alt+Q it should give you your command prompt back.

@moris said in Please help:

Pi @ raspberrypi: ~ $ cd MagicMirror
Pi @ raspberrypi: ~ / MagicMirror $ cp config / config.js.samaple config / config.js
Cp: ​​target ‘config.js’ is not a directory
Pi @ raspberrypi: ~ / MagicMirror $

There’s a problem in your second command. There should be no space between config and the slash. There needs to be a period at the end of sample. It should read like so: cp config/config.js.sample config/config.js

That line breaks down into command-source-destination. “Copy”-“sample file”-“destination file”. cp config/config.js.sample config/config.js

@pepemujica I believe the MMM-MotionDetection module works with the Pi camera. Facial recognition and gesture control should also work with the Pi camera. You may need to flip a few switches.

@Shawnsully Double-check your commas and curly braces, specifically at the beginning of your module entry. You have:

},
     module: 'MMM-NFL',
     position: ‘bottom_left’,
...

You probably want:

},
{
     module: 'MMM-NFL',
     position: ‘bottom_left’,
    ...

@robiv8 - Data in an excel spreadsheet is useful for calculating values and displaying them. The difficulty in using a Magic Mirror to display such values is that you now have to transfer the excel file to the Magic Mirror so it can be read by the module. (You can get around this by making the file available over the network and telling the mirror to look at a specific network path).

You also have to write some sort of interpretation to pull the data out of Excel and display it on the screen. If you just wish to display a spreadsheet, this isn’t too difficult. Things get complicated when you want to extract only certain parts of that spreadsheet (such as computed totals). Excel doesn’t store total values in the cells, it stores formulas. Just displaying the contents on the mirror results in values that look like =$AE+SUM(B3..B14)

The preferred way of doing these things is to make the computed data available via a web API and then use the Magic Mirror to query the API and display the values. That module has already been written.

I do love the mirrors I have created. My creations are like my children and like most children they eventually leave the nest and go forth to enjoy lives of their own. Except for Brad. Who is never going to amount to anything if he doesn’t get a job and move out of the basement. All he does is sleep and play Fortnite instead of… but I digress.

This last mirror made me realize that I needed a way to connect to it after it was no longer in my physical control. My relatives aren’t very technical and it’s no fun for either of us to walk them through a troubleshooting session over the phone. It would be much easier if I could just remote into the mirror like I did when I was building it.

It gets complicated when you realize that anyone with a WiFi network in their house is going to have a consumer-grade firewall in place. The usual solution is to get on the router and forward a port to the Pi, but that requires you to know the internal IP address of the Pi, the external IP address of the router, and your friends have to trust you with password to their router (which may not be configured to allow remote administration). And that’s just the start.

My solution was to have the Pi reach out to a server that I control and establish a reverse SSH session. Because residential gateways allow any outbound connection by default, the Pi reaching out to the server is allowed without any extra configuration of the router. By connecting to a server outside of my home network, I didn’t have to worry about configuring my router to forward a port to my computer for the connection. And by choosing a cloud provider, I could spin the connection up & down as needed.

I had several requirements for this project. I work in an internet security company, so it’s entirely possible that I went a bit overboard on my paranoia. But my goals were:

• Secure remote access to the Pi via private/public key exchange
• Connect to the Pi regardless of what kind of firewall was in place
• No modification of target network firewalls
• No modification of my network firewall
• Portability of the mirror to different networks (Little Suzie takes the mirror with her to college and the enterprise-level gateways involved)
• Self-healing connection that requires no intervention from mirror owner
• Maximum use of open-source software, minimum use of black box code

I’ve broken the process up into a handful of steps. Links to each portion are here:
Generating Your Key Pairs
Signing Up for the Cloud
Configuring a Dynamic DNS to Your Server
Connecting the Pi to Your Server
Connecting to the Remote Pi

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.