@Reotch2 I started by editing together the videos into a single 5 minute video, using the vertical sources. These show up on my normal computer monitor as rotated 90 degrees. Once i had the video edited (with several of the buffer video interspersed to add some tension), I output the video as a full resolution 1920x1080 MP4. I copied that video over to the pi and then used ffdshow to rotate the video 90 degrees. This part took close to 30 minutes and it made the pi sweat resistors.

Once the file was rotated, I created a one-line script file called boo.sh that contains omxplayer -p -o hdmi --loop --alpha 85 boo.mp4. Start it up with pm2 (pm2 start boo.sh) and then save it.

Originally I was going to convert the file to webm, but the ffdshow that installed on the pi doesn’t have that switch enabled. I didn’t feel like recompiling ffdshow, so I just went with a H264 encoded MP4.

I played around with this a bit. In the end, running omxplayer with a resized and rotated video was the way to go. Oh, and I re-edited a few videos together in order to provide a more seamless experience. I’ll see about capturing some video tomorrow and uploading it.

I used pm2 to manage a quick script to keep the video going in case of failure. Overall, I’m quite pleased. Now to do the same to my office mirror…

@stangarrang Sure, no problem. Quick question: Did you enter pm2 save after you started both the motion and the Magic Mirror processes?

@noorm91 npm start is the command to start the Magic Mirror application and display the interface on the screen.

@hall1458 Wow. Dude, I’m sorry that nobody has stepped in to help you out. I’m not much of a *nix guy, but I’ve been dealing with this at work for various reasons. I’ll do what I can.

The NTP service should synchronize your Pi’s clock with one of many time servers out on the internet. If you get a terminal onto your Pi and type ps ax | grep ntpd you should see this line in return: 602 ? Ss 0:04 /usr/sbin/ntpd -p /var/run/ntpd.pid -g -u 106:111. Some parts will be different. This is good. If all you see is grep --color=auto ntp then the NTP service isn’t running. Post back here and we’ll get that fixed.

Assuming that NTP is running on your pi, you will want to check the configuration of your NTP server. Type nano /etc/ntp.conf. If you see a blank screen/file, then you have a problem. Assuming you do see a file, you want to look for the following lines:

# pool: 
server 0.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst
server 1.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst
server 2.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst
server 3.debian.pool.ntp.org iburst

These are the servers that your Pi will be checking for a valid time. You can manually check them as well. Exit the /etc/ntp.conf file and type ntpq -pn and wait. You should see something like this:

     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
+173.71.73.207   .PPS.            1 u  856 1024  377   18.624   -1.660   5.766
+66.228.59.187   128.59.0.245     2 u  468 1024  377   27.636    0.276   6.356
*199.102.46.76   .GPS.            1 u  839 1024  377   37.422    0.189   4.440
+23.239.24.67    200.98.196.212   2 u  713 1024  377   48.940   -1.173   2.743

At least one of those lines should have an asterisk at the beginning. Give it a go and report back.

I hope my configuration will help give you guys another possibility. I locked down my camera a bit with a username & password. So my configuration looks as so:

{
module: "MMM-RTSPStream",
    position: "bottom_left",
    config: {
          autostart: true,
          rotateStreams: false,
          showSnapWhenPaused: false,
          moduleWidth: 354,
          moduleHeight: 242,
          stream1: {
               name: 'Front Door',
               url: 'rtsp://[username]:[password]@10.0.0.25/cam1/mpeg4',
               port: 8027,
               shutdownDelay: 0,
               width: 352,
               height: 240,
               frameRate: "30"
               }
          }
}

I’ve built three mirrors so far. The first was with acrylic and the next two were glass. The glass is definitely the way to go. The acrylic warps a bit so you get a slight funhouse mirror effect, especially along the edges. I built that one in my garage, but it now lives in Florida. The change in climate made the frame expand and put pressure on the edges of the acrylic, making it warp slightly.

The glass doesn’t have this problem. (Although both of those mirrors are local).

For what it’s worth:

Hardware: BCM2835
Revision: a02082

And I do not have the problem.

@TiemenMoesker Okay, not a problem. This may not free up resources, but it will remove some of the unused programs from the default Raspian image. This is more important with smaller SD cards where space is at a premium.

sudo apt-get remove --purge idle3 java-common libreoffice* minecraft-pi scratch nuscratch penguinspuzzle python-minecraftpi python3-minecraftpi smartsim sonic-pi wolfram-engine

The second option is to increase the amount of memory that is dedicated to the graphics chip on the pi. If you enter sudo raspi-config from the command line, you’ll get a basic configuration window. If you’re actually on the pi, you can go to the main menu ->sudo Preferences and one of the tabs in the pi configuration is the GPU memory allocation. The default is 64MB IIRC. You can bump that up to 128 or 256 and see if it helps with your animation issue.

Note: It seems like these suggestions don’t help anyway. Nuts.

Have you guys tried allocating more memory to the GPU? I think the default is like 64MB or something. I bumped mine to 128MB a while ago.

One other dumb suggestion: Did you remove the nonessential stuff from your Raspian installs? The Minecraft, Wolfram Alpha, etc. as per the complete setup tutorial?

@reaper81 You can use the same camera for both, but you’ll want to use a different module for motion detection. If you check out my posts, I put up a tutorial on using the PiCam for motion detection outside of the MirrorMirror framework. There’s no reason you can’t use my tutorial to get motion detection to turn your mirror display on and then the facial recognition module to switch the layout.

At least… no reason that I know of.

@I_Am_Anthony Off the top of my head, use the scheduling module and the background image module in conjunction. There’s no reason you can’t put the background module in twice and swap 'em out at a particular time.

@SvenSommer I use a Fitlet microPC. Quad core, AMD processor, AMD graphics, 8GB RAM.

I know you have a solution and all, but PM2 should already be running on your Pi as part of the installation process.

Did you save your PM2 state before reboot? If you’re willing to experiment, remove the PM2 commands from your crontab and reboot your mirror. Once it’s back up, start the mirror with pm2 start mm, wait for the interface to appear and then enter pm2 save.

Once PM2 has saved the state, reboot your mirror and MM2 should start after a few seconds.

@chaseb1357 The expensive parts are going to be the monitor and the mirror itself. If you’re willing to put in the time, there are a couple ways to save money.

• Acrylic mirrors are cheaper than glass mirrors and only are only slightly lesser quality. www.tapplastics.com is a decent source for one-way acrylic.
• One-way film is even cheaper than one-way acrylic. If you’re willing to go slow and try multiple times, you can put one-way film on a sheet of plain glass.
• The monitor is the other large expense. If you’re willing to stay with a landscape orientation, you can repurpose a used LCD television instead of a computer monitor. A cheap 32" TV is cheaper than a 32" monitor.
• Honestly, I’d skip the touchscreen aspect. I know you don’t want to hear it, but a touchscreen mirror is just asking for fingerprints & smudges.

@oldversions That’s nice. With some right-angle plugs, you’d be good to go with that.

@jade said in Config.js file Syntax:

now I have a working mirror that sporadically gives me game of thrones quotes! My office at work is now much brighter!

Well, you do until he kills off another Stark child.

Please use the Markdown features to post code and console output. It makes it so much easier to read.

@rodofrn Other than a temporary outage of the web service? Hrm. Have you tried reinstalling those particular modules? I wonder if the new version of MM is somehow interfering with the authentication of the email and commute app.

You should be able to replicate the commute web call with a carefully crafted CURL command. Pass it your API key and such and see if you get an error. Make sure to do so from the Pi.

One of my mirrors had a similar issue after the update, but it sorted itself after I resolved some connectivity problems.

@rodofrn Do you have anything in your logs that indicates a problem?