@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.

There’s definitely something going on with your config.js file. Looking at the code, it’s not picking up the focus_on entry that you’ve supplied.

Try to post the relevant section of your config.js again. Check the markdown options for how to post blocks of code. It’s probably something trivial, but without a good look into your config, I don’t think we can help you.

This may be a bit weird, but I’m trying to install this on a non-RaspberryPi piece of hardware running Ubuntu 20. Is there a manual installation process that doesn’t require OMXPlayer?I realize that it will limit my options to VLC, but I’m willing to try. I’m getting caught up on it trying to install a player that isn’t available on Ubuntu.

I tried installing OMXPlayer through the Snap store, but because the hardware is AMD64, it’s not available.

It looks like there’s not a lot of reflectiveness to that mirror. You’re not going to improve on that. On the plus side, it means that whatever is behind that glass will show through really well. :)

I think you can salvage it, but you’ll probably want to put the mirror in a bright area. The transmission through the glass should be very good, so you’ll be able to see the content even in a brightly lit room.

Sorry about the delay! Lots of other projects going on at the Fortress Hepler.

To answer your questions, @johnnyboy :

• I created a simple one-line script that plays the video on a loop and then added it to the PM2 management via pm2 start boo.sh and pm2 save. I disabled the Magic Mirror interface via pm2 stop MagicMirror and pm2 save. Now when then mirror boots, PM2 only watches over the script that calls the video playback.
• It’s not running the MagicMirror interface. No sense using all that overhead and calls to the weather API when it’s not being displayed.
• Caveat: the right display runs a video on loop under normal circumstances. Commenting out the one line that runs that video file and adding a line to play a different video file was trivial.
• Yes, VLC has the option to play a playlist or single file on a loop. You can find the command line options at VLC Help
• Not really. The file is already on the disk and sized to the resolution of the monitor. There’s no CPU or GPU intensive tasks and the on board hardware acceleration takes care of most of it.

@elitecybernet - Yeah, there is sound included in the video files. I turned it down as it got really distracting really quickly. The video is only like 3 minutes long and hearing the demonic laughter every 3 minutes got old. I think the left portrait was at 50% volume and the right was completely muted.

Now that Halloween is gone, I reverted the left & right displays to their original format. Because PM2 manages the scripts, it took all of 30 seconds per display. The hardest part was remembering their IP address so I could log in.