I’ve done this by putting a relay directly in the backlight circuit. Connect the PIR to 5V and a gpio pin, and the relay to 5V and another GPIO pin. Use wiring pi and a simple bash script to get the state of the PIR and energize/de-energize the relay appropriately. It’s really simpler than it sounds and requires little to no knowledge of electronics.

You need to first install wiring-pi

sudo wget https://project-downloads.drogon.net/wiringpi-latest.deb
sudo dpkg -i wiringpi-latest.deb

Here’t the script I run at startup to control it - works great.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Runs in the background to switch backlight on or off
# depending upon the state of the PIR motion sensor.   
#
# Usage: nohup backlightd [-r|-f] 0<&- &>/dev/null &
# 	-r log on loghost
#	-f log locally (default)
#
# Set as configured
PIR=18		# GPIO BCM number of PIR sensor
BACKL=15	# GPIO BCM number of backlight relay
OFF_DEL=60	# Minimum number of seconds to keep backlight om
ON_DEL=2	# Minimum number of seconds to keep backlight off
TIMO=3600	# Maximum number of seconds to wait for edge event
#
# Set for local policies
PRIO=local.info 		# if using rsyslog set priority
TAG=backlightd			# and tag to use on loghost
LOGFILE=/var/log/backlightd.log	# if using local syslog file

PATH=/bin:/usr/bin

# error handling
xit() { rlog "Line $1 Err $2 - $3  - exiting"; exit "$2"; }
die() { rlog "Exit signal received - exiting"; exit 0; }

# logging
case $1 in
	-r) rlog() { /usr/bin/logger -p "${PRIO}" -t "${TAG}" "$1"; } ;;
	 *) rlog() { /bin/echo "$1" >>"${LOGFILE}" ; } ;;
esac

cd / || xit $LINENO $? "Cannot cd to / ?!?"

reset(){
	# reset gpio pins, set initial conditions
	gpio edge "$PIR" both \
		|| xit $LINENO $? "Cannot set edge GPIO$PIR"
	gpio export "$BACKL" out \
		|| xit $LINENO $? "Cannot set export GPIO$BACKL"
	PIR_STATE=$(gpio -g read "$PIR") \
		|| xit $LINENO $? "Cannot read GPIO$PIR"
	gpio -g write "$BACKL" "$PIR_STATE" \
		|| xit $LINENO $? "Cannot write to GPIO$BACKL"
}

trap reset SIGUSR1
trap die   SIGTERM 

reset

while true
do
	timeout "$TIMO" gpio -g wfi "$PIR" both ; STAT=$?
	if [ "$STAT" -eq 124 ]; then
		rlog "gpio wfi timed out after ${TIMO}s - respawning" 
		STAT=0
	fi
	[ "$STAT" ] || xit $LINENO $STAT "gpio wfi terminated abnormally"
	PIR_STATE=$(gpio -g read "$PIR") \
		|| xit $LINENO $? "Cannot read GPIO$PIR"
	gpio -g write "$BACKL" "$PIR_STATE" \
		|| xit $LINENO $? "Cannot write GPIO$PIR"
	if [ "$PIR_STATE"  ]
		then sleep "$ON_DEL" 
		else sleep "$OFF_DEL"
	fi
done

I’m trying to use this for newsfeeds module.

It says in the documentation to use
this.sendNotification(‘ARTICLE_whatever’);
If I put this anywhere in config.js, it fails to recognize the config.js
If I put this anywhere in newsfeeds.js it fails to load.

I’ve done some programming but I know absolutely nothing about javascript.

@andyc7687 I know this is almost 2 years later, but this did not work on the pi zero w. I got to the point of on page 18 where it was supposed to say MagicMirror running. But it never did. It did say it was installed correctly, and to reboot, which I did, but it isn’t working.

$ pm2 show MagicMirror
[PM2][WARN] MagicMirror doesn’t exist

I don’t even know how to begin to troubleshoot this. (This was my second attempt at trying to install magic mirror.)

I tried flashing magicmirroros. I managed to get ssh running and the wpa_supplicant to get on the wifi. All I get on the console is a blank screen.

As I was unable to get anything to work, I tried updating using sdetweil/MagicMirror_scripts but it says the pi zero is not supported.

I’m completely lost now.