Thought I’d share how I used the ‘Alert/Notification’ system in MagicMirror2 as a call display.

First I set up the MagicMirror2 Module: MMM-RestApi.

What is important to configure the API module properly in the ‘config.js’ is the ip of the MagicMirror node server.

By default it is set to ‘localhost’, this will need to be changed to the ip address of the raspberry pi.

Next is setting up IP addresses to the MagicMirrors whitelist.

To be honest, I set my whitelist to ‘[]’, which allows any connection.

Here is the fun part:

I used one of these:

Yeah, remember waaaay back when all we had was dial-up internet connection?

Well, it would seem that these dial-up usb modems may still have a purpose.

Instead of trying to call out to the internet, we are going to monitor call data on a landline telephone system.

There are many different ways to set up this device to the magic mirror. You could probably even connect it directly to a raspberry pi.

Because I host a home server for media and automation/security… okay I can’t help myself I’m posting a picture of the server and network wall:

… i digress …

I decided I would attach the phone modem to my server, so I could manipulate the data and send it to whatever device I wanted.

I read up on ‘AT’ commands (the commands that dial-up modems understand and found some useful information from Google.

I created a console app in visual studio, I’ll post the code on GitHUB, in case anyone is interested. I’ll post a link here shortly.

In any case, it works great!

EDIT: Here is the initial commit to Git:
Windows Console App…
Maybe I’ll code it in .netCore so it’ll be cross-platform.

HomePhoneModemController

@E3V3A many thanks, I think it is a cool project so I will :)

Hi! I have been following these projects for quite a while and decided it was finally time to create one of these smart mirrors.

I have created a custom module for my Emby Media Server (I am a plugin developer over at emby.media)

My mirror now connects to Emby and tells me about ‘nextup’ tv episodes and new movies available in my library to watch… cool!

I’m going to install my custom Alexa skills as well so it will control my smart home just like the echos around the house.
Tapping into Embys DLNA server, the mirror will start playback of media on all the devices around just like the echos do.

I’m also going to add motion detection to the mirror to get it to come alive when someone is in front of it.

I’m interested in the IpCam modules because I have also created a custom Alexa skill/Server which allows Alexa to describe people in Security Camera footage, by way of Microsoft Cognitive Sense API.

When I ask Alexa who is at the door, it returns a string description of the person/people in the footage {Approx Age}/{Gender}/{Accessories}. I would also like to have the mirror show footage during this time as well.

Here are some pics so far!

many thanks ;)

Hi!
Recently I have been using Magic Mirrors alert system, along with the RESTful(ish) Api to show an image from my home security camera.

Example API POST request:

"http://192.168.2.48:8080/api/v1/modules/alert/show_ALERT?timer=10500&imageUrl=http://192.168.2.18:9920/security/values/2&imageHeight=220px";

Where the image is being served on a custom security web server.

Everything is working quite nicely using the API module, however, it would seem that the magic mirror server is keeping an image in a cache and will repeat the same image over and over despite the POST request sending it a more current image.

Is there a way to clear the Magic Mirrors cache?
Perhaps a command I can send through the API prior to giving the Alert module the new image?

I hope this question is making sense to the lead developers.

I can go into more detail and explain the workflow further if this isn’t making sense to anyone.

Many thanks!

Thank you for the direction. It would seem that after a full day of mucking about, I have finally got it. Horray!
Emby Media Server now has a place on my mirror.

I’ll have to go tell the guys over there about. I have a feeling this Magic Mirror might catch on over there, especially now that there will be an official Emby plugin for it.

Thank you again @E3V3A for taking the time to show some direction.

Chef

Upon further research, perhaps it is Electron which is cache the image.

And I might be wrong but it looks as though clearing cache has to happen in the core of the application.

Something like “session.Clear()”

Are you giving your raspberry pi an ip address of “0.0.0.0”?

Why?

The address line should be the IP address of your pi.

Having it listen on any interface hasn’t really worked well.

Then the whitelist is an array of ip address. If you leave it empy (ex. []) then all the devices on your network will be able to access your mirror.

This is what mine looks like:

var config = {
	address: "192.168.2.48", 
	port: 8080,
	ipWhitelist: [],

This especially makes a difference when using the “Restfull-ish” API. It is necessary to give the address line an ip address :)

Unfortunately, the Netflix APi is on lockdown. I know this from my work with Emby Server. Netflix requests get made all the time over there and the answer is usually the same, “can’t do it…”.

That being said, I’m sure there would be ways of hacking together something, but I think it would be breaking a lot of terms and conditions.

I was looking on github at a couple of “chrome cast” like casting npms for raspberry pi, just the other day.

There are a couple of good ones. The thing is, some of them need a specific application added to your phone/device to cast to raspberry pi. There was one in particular that caught my eye, and it looks promissing.

It is this one: https://github.com/vbaicu/mMusicCast

Thing is, it says it’ll cast Youtube (which is awesome), or maybe even your device screen (which could be useful…), but not Netflix specifically.

You could somehow put chrome into an application window on your pi.

You can do this to chrome by opening Chrome with these parameters:

“PATH_TO_CHROME” --app=“YOUR_URL”

This is pretty hacky… and It’s not completely window-less.

One other thing to keep in mind when attempting this.
The MM application itself might not handle any HD streaming, so this would mean that you would have to…probabaly… have the OMXPlayer installed, and placed on top of your MM interface in order to get a stable stream. There are probably better developers on the forum here than I, who understand the ‘ins and outs’ of making that happen in a Debian style environment…

Probably didn’t help much here.

@maxbachmann that’s a really great idea. I noticed that is how some of the Security Camera MM2 modules work.

I had thought about using an intervalTimer which showed a list of images in succession, but I think that would be worse than a GIF for the Raspi. :zipper-mouth_face:

Finally got everything back to normal.

Yep! Must have been a corrupted segment of my sd card. Had to start from scratch, and even now hold shift while loading and reinstalling Raspbian is cause errors.

Just out of curiousity, if I don’t upgrade the MMM, how long does the ‘new version available’ popup on the top of the MMM show? Is it forever or does it eventually disappear?

Interesting how my account ‘pi’ has ‘permission denied’ while trying to work in the MagicMirror folders.

Perhaps my setup is corrupt…

Hey guys!

the latest update for magicmirror went well.

One issue though,
I haven’t really ever had an easy time with the calendar module.
I had applied a fix found somewhere on the forums here, which did some editing to the configuration js file for the calendar, which seemed to fix it.

I don’t remember what it was, or where I found it sorry.

I did run into an issue this morning when updating the mirror app.

The calendar seems to sit in a ‘loading…’ state.

I’m about to read through the module again and see what I can find, but I thought I’d ask here and see if anyone might have some facts or information regarding similar calendar issues, which might help me better locate the possible problem.

Cool,

Chef

I also used eye candy! it’s great! but unfortunately, yeah, it runs up the memory, and in my case crashes the display… I have since commented out the plugin in my config, but that plugin is top shelf man! love it!!

Wanted to bump this, sorry.