Posts made by bhepler

Your friend’s kid should be able to change the WiFi network easily enough. You will probably want to sit down with her and walk through the steps once or twice just to be sure. It’s pretty simple:

• Plug a mouse & keyboard into the Pi. I like the mini wireless keyboard & trackpad devices for this purpose.
• Once the Pi has finished booting, press Ctrl+q to close the app. If you’re using PM2, it will try to restart it so you’ll want to turn that off temporarily by pressing Ctrl+Alt+t to open a terminal window and pm2 stop all to stop pm2 from restarting the Magic Mirror interface.
• In the upper right corner is the WiFi symbol. Right-click on that (yay mouse!) and then select the target network. Log in to the network like a normal person.
• Test your connection to be sure you can see the internet. Pro tip: if you don’t want to wait for the Chromium browser to load, you can enter curl ipinfo.io/ip to test your connection. If you get anything other than an IP address in return, you need to troubleshoot your connection.
• Once you are connected, you should be able to enter pm2 start all to get the mirror interface back. This should survive a reboot.

To your 2nd question: Probably not. Any university worth its salt will have an enterprise-level gateway in place that will prevent inbound connections without some custom configuration. I would look into a reverse SSH connection. That would be a command that she would enter into the terminal that would establish an SSH connection to your network. You could then use that connection to make changes to her Pi.

I’m working on this right now, in fact. Hit me up in April and I should have procedures for you.

At this point, I’m thinking a sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade might be in order. There could be a bug in the Pi’s power management routines.

It looks like pm2 isn’t completely configured. Did you run the pm2 startup command and did you run the command it spits out at the end?

@Medo - Yeah, my free API key was shut down last week.

@roxx - You can always create an ISO file of your SD card. You can restore from that if your SD card becomes corrupted.

I find that copying the config.js file is 90% of the way there. It will list the modules that you have installed, which you can download fresh from GitHub with little problem. The config file will contain the API keys, so that’s the part that individual to your mirror in most cases.

Having a copy of the Raspbian image on hand is probably another 5%.

Spinning up a new Pi with a given config.js isn’t that hard.

1. Flash the Raspian image to SD card and boot to it.
2. Remove unwanted features (Wolfram Alpha, Minecraft, LibreOffice, etc.)
3. Update, upgrade, distro upgrade.
4. Install Node, Electron & XScreenSaver. Configure screensaver to never save the screen.
5. Clone Magic Mirror & npm install
6. Restoreconfig.js from backup.
7. Clone & npm install the modules listed in the config.js file.
8. enjoy!

@aecandroid - I’m not seeing anything obviously incorrect with your config. What behavior are you seeing that you wish to fix? Are you getting the module to display at all? Are you getting any modules to display at all? Are you just not getting the icons that you wish?

Looks pretty sharp! Great job.

@aecandroid - Please check out this guide on how to use the markdown features of the forum. Then go back and properly block out your config.js file. That will make debugging your code much easier.

@seramik - Warnings are just that: warnings. I usually ignore them and concentrate on errors. Errors will prevent your mirror from working.

This, OTOH, is important:

WARNING! Could not find config file. Please create one. Starting with default configuration.

To fix this, you need to copy the included sample configuration file to its final destination. This will become your working configuration file and what you will edit as you add modules.

cd ~/MagicMirror/config
cp config.js.sample config.js

So now when you want to change the behavior of your mirror, you will edit the config.js file.

@motdog - No worries. We’re here to help if you run into another problem.

Here’s a quick rundown of the moving parts to a typical magic mirror:
nodejs - This is what runs the Magic Mirror framework. It technically runs a dynamic webpage which is what you see on your monitor.
npm - Node Package Manager. This is a tool that ships with nodejs that handles the downloading of required packages, compiling and running of nodejs applications - including the Magic Mirror framework.
electron - This is like a web browser that runs on the Raspi desktop. It shows what nodejs is serving up, minus all the annoying bits of a web browser (menus, address bar, etc.)
node_helper.js - This is an optional Javascript file in any module. It is responsible for passing data between the front end (display information) and the back end (calls to web services, authentication, etc.)
pm2 - This is a process monitoring application. It’s responsible for running the Magic Mirror startup script and acts as sort of a cruise control. If the Magic Mirror crashes, pm2 will detect that the script has stopped and restart it. This is normally what starts your magic mirror when it boots.
X-server - This is the desktop environment for your typical Raspberry Pi. This is what electron runs in, so it must be started in order for electron to work. I’m 90% positive that it’s also necessary for the included web browser Chromium to work. This is what your command startx is firing up.
config.js - You’ve probably encountered this guy. This is the configuration file for the Magic Mirror web application. It helps to remember that this file is basically a Javascript data file. It controls how the web application loads and positions modules. It’s important to realize that the module itself may need to be installed/compiled before included in the config file. Including an uninstalled module isn’t going to help you much.

I hope this helps.