@hesspoint You can shut down the operating system BUT you can’t completely shutdown the power to it. The only way to actually have the pi completely off is to unplug it. By running a shutdown command the led on the pi will still be drawing power and showing you it “isn’t running”.

If you just want to shutdown the operating system/mirror etc and don’t care that the pi still has power… Then, you can do it via the operating system. There is a thing called a cron job which you setup on the crontab. You can set it to run every night at the same time.

Here is a link on the raspberry pi forum about retropi (a different project) that will tell you how setup your cron .
https://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2018/03/raspberry-pi-retropie-shutdown-button/

There are some MagicMirror modules that might help you do the same thing via a web url that points to the pi at your house. You would need a fixed ip address at your house, setup your router to allow the outside world to talk directly to your pi, and setup the module too. I haven’t used one of them.

I think there is an Internet of Things IOT module that could probably work via IFTTT too.

@plainbroke did you look at your pm2 logs? Sam really helped me by explaining where to look. I’ll bet it’s a module.

@sdetweil If I didn’t need a breadboard for testing the button circuits I’m adding, it could be done the way you say. I’m not working on the appearance of my mirror, If I were then I’d do as you suggest. I’m working on adding hardware buttons and a new module to make them function the way I want.

I find it easier to just remove the pi, take it to my desktop where I have a very wide monitor. And where I can play with wiring, breadboard, resisitors, buttons etc. I added the following to my config

electronOptions: {
		fullscreen: false,
		width: 950,
		height: 950
	},

so I can have mm running on one quarter of my screen, I have plenty of room for geany on the other and a terminal window, etc. then can just f5 or ctrl+r when I want to test.

@plainbroke ctrl+m does not stop MagicMirror. It minimizes it so it isn’t showing full screen.

m = minimize

@plainbroke
I use Ctrl+m too so I can minimize the electron browser in order to get to terminal and restart mm.

Are you using pm2? If so, use this command in the terminal to see how many actual instances of MagicMirror are running.

pm2 ls

NOTE: You could see more things in the taskmanager in certain situations where another processing thread is required. That doesn’t mean that Electron or MagicMirror has extra “copies” running on your machine. (My machine always shows at least 8 electron threads running, but I only have one MagicMirror instance running. The more modules have in my mirror, the more electron threads show in taskmanager).

Using pm2 ls, if you see more than one instance you can kill the extras by using the id number of the extra instances. Also, if you see more than one instance, you may just need to redo the pm2 setup.

If F5 or Ctrl+r don’t work (sometimes they don’t seem to fully restart mm if I’ve added a node package to a module I’m working on) then I use the following command from the terminal.

pm2 restart mm

to fully reinitialize and restart mm if I need to in when I’m developing/editing a module.

@kayakbabe DRAT! I just crushed my microSD with my wheelchair. It is definitely time for bed.

@sdetweil your explanations helped a lot. I debugged using a timer in the node_helper to fake detecting different types of button press and my module will send magic mirror notifications. (So, if I can detect the actual physical events I’m pretty sure my script will work.

I think it’s the node package I’m trying to use that is the problem.

I even got so far as to figure out that a dependency of the package I want to used wasn’t compiled for Node version 16. which i what I’ve got running on my Mirror pi. I figured out it is c++ and even figured out how to recompile it with node-gyp and make. so now I do not get any errors in the pm2 error log. but now instead of a black screen electron, I don’t get electron opening a window at all. I check the PM2 logs. There are no errors in the mm-error log. It is blank.
However, the pm2 mm-out log is being added to over and over, so electron and MagicMirror are running. and the error keeps being repeated in the mm-out log.

The error which i’ve googled and gotten no working result for is:

ERROR Error: Cannot find module 'bindings'. 

Yet there is a bindings folder in the node_helper folder.
Is there a way to find out what path is being used to try to find “bindings”.

Or maybe the package I’m trying to use just is too much of a mess to keep screwing with. It sure seems like it would be super useful. I wanted to add a few physcial intermittant buttons and be able to assign multiple uses to them. Funny thing is… it works great when I run the test script in the command line using node.

https://github.com/bnielsen1965/rpi-gpio-buttons

By the way, this learning nodejs and module development is not all that easy.

@DrFalken said in IR control of presentations?:

Hey everyone - i’m looking to run https://revealjs.com/demo/ on MM, in a web browser module. I have a basic MM setup but otherwise a newbie :)

The idea would be to able to able navigate through the slides with an IR remote (either mimicking keystrokes, or issuing api calls to the revealjs server.

Does this seem realistic to do? Any pointers on implementation would be very helpful!

As others have explained, MagicMirror won’t do what you want.

To solve your need,
There are presentation wireless “mice” which look like tv remotes which can do what you want, if you are using a computer to display your website on a screen.
OR
you could turn each slide of your presentation into a graphic image and load them on a usb stick. Most “smart” tv’s have the ability to display images from a usb stick and will allow you to adjust the settings so you can change pages by clicking on your tv’s remote control.

@sdetweil if start is for one time things, where would I do work that must be repeated endlessly like a sensor or button that needs to be constantly checked.

If I have to init a node package that my module uses, I do that in start? so setting up in module variables is done in start?

@BKeyport Your idea of the positioning system improvement is very interesting. I would at the least like to be able to insert subdivisions of middle_center and the others that are full width.
In my case, I would like to have middle_center_left, middle_center_middle, middle_center_right. Perhaps we can insert into the DOM to create them and then delay loading of any module that is assigned to the location. Perhaps there is a way to manually handle that already, but I’ve not bothered yet. perhaps adding flex to the css of of middle_center would be sufficient. I suppose that is a bridge I will cross when I arrive there.