Installing MagicMirror²

Thanks to @MichMich and his outstanding installation script, installing MagicMirror² is pretty straight forward.

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Step 1
After you’ve configured and updated your Raspberry Pi and rebooted, launch a Terminal window again and type in
bash -c "$(curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MichMich/MagicMirror/master/installers/raspberry.sh)"

This will start the installation process for you:

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Step 2
A few configurations still need to be done on the Raspberry Pi, specific for MagicMirror². Let’s start with rotating the display vertically. For this, you’ll need to edit one of the boot configurations. (Please note: If you plan on running MagicMirror² as a landscape (or wide) display, you do not need to do this.)

Type in sudo nano /boot/config.txt and add the following to the file. Where you add it doesn’t really matter:

# Rotate display vertically
display_rotate=1

Press CTRL-X when you’re done, and say Y(es) to saving the changes.

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Step 3
Let’s disable the screen saver and screen blanking as well. This needs to be done in two places. First in the autostart configuration:
sudo nano /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart

And add the following to the bottom of the file:

@xset s noblank
@xset s off
@xset -dpms

Next in the X-windows manager configuration:
sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

Scroll down to the [SeatDefaults] section and look for the xserver-command line below that. Change the line to look like this:
xserver-command=X -s 0 -dpms (so you’re removing the # on the front, and adding the missing bits at the end.) Again, hit CTRL-X and say Y(es) to saving the file.

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Step 4
A Raspberry Pi is configured to automatically shutdown parts of the hardware that aren’t actively in use. This includes the WiFi driver. This will cause MagicMiror² to occasionally fail to fetch updates for things like the newsfeed, weather, and others. You can disable the power saving feature for the WiFi from the interfaces configuration file:
sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

Find the wlan0 section and add wireless-power off below it:

Once you’re done with that, reboot the rpi one more time with sudo reboot and when it comes back up again, open a Terminal window and type in iwconfig and you should see that the Power Management is now off:

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At this point you have completed the basic install for MagicMirror². The next step is to create a valid configuration file for it so you can test it out. You can do that by going into the MagicMirror’s config folder:

pi@magicpi:~ $ cd MagicMirror/config
pi@magicpi:~/MagicMirror/config $ cp config.js.sample config.js

You can now try to start MagicMirror².

pi@magicpi:~/MagicMirror/config $ cd $HOME/MagicMirror
pi@magicpi:~/MagicMirror $ npm start

If everything went well, your screen should load up the MagicMirror² interface. The weather module will tell you that you don’t have a valid APPID, but once set, your screen should look like this:

Congratulations!

In case one wants to know where the various regions are. Missing are the fullscreen_below and fullscreen_above as those cover the whole screen, one under everything else and the other above.

top_bar and bottom_bar are light gray
top_left and bottom_left are red
top_center and bottom_center are blue
top_right and bottom_right are green
upper_third is yellow
middle_center is cyan
lower_third is magenta

All these regions will resize as needed.

What will follow this post will be a series of steps to go from taking a brand new raspberry Pi 3 out of the box to having MagicMirror² up and running. I will try to keep things in order but that’s no guarantee. I will however link each post back into this one in the correct order, so you’d be able to just click on the link and jump straight to that specific post.

The Raspberri Pi setup is as follows:

Note: I have no affiliation with the listed vendors. I list them because that’s where I got the parts from. You can buy them wherever you buy your daily dose of electronics.

• Raspberry Pi 3 - Model B - ARMv8 with 1GB of RAM (Adafruit)
• 5V/2.4A Power supply (Adafruit)
• 8GB Sandisk Ultra Class 10 MicroSDHC card (Amazon)
• ASUS ProArt PA248Q Monitor (Amazon)
• Belkin 6’ HDMI Cable (Amazon)
• Mini 2.4G Wireless Keyboard & Mouse Combo (eBay)

Notes:

1. The Raspberry Pi 3 needs a hefty power supply to run. You don’t need a 2.4Amp one, but I wouldn’t go below 2Amps.
2. You want a high speed SD card. Since the entire OS runs off of it, get a fast one. eLunix.org has a comprehensive list of what’s tested and works. You can find the list here.
3. Monitor and choice of cable is obviously up to you.
4. I use a mini keyboard for any/all of my projects that require a temporary solution. Even those that need a permanent one. They’re smaller than a regular sized one. And this one in particular is also rather thin. And I like that they are wireless. it cuts down on the cords needed to be connected to the device itself. These ones have a miniature USB dongle. Again, personal choice.
5. I will be running this wirelessly and will make a note of it again in the setup part.
6. I will be using my Windows 10 system for the initial setup of the card containing the operating system. What you use is up to you, however keep in mind that any screen captures I take and any software I use during this process will be from a Windows 10 platform.
7. DO NOT INSTALL MagicMirror² as the root user! Always do it as the regular, non privileged pi user and learn to use the sudo command instead. “But why?”, you ask, “… if it’s in my house, and on my network, and not on the internet.” That’s all fine, however we don’t control every possible module that others contribute and someone, or something, could expose your Raspberry Pi, or your entire network to the outside world. Just don’t do it.
8. This entire tutorial is based on you having physical access to the Raspberry Pi. After all, you will need that to set it up, but even at the end, installing MagicMirror², it is assumed you are doing that directly on the Raspberry Pi, and not through a remote SSH login.

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Section 1: Preparing the SD card with the operating system
Section 2: Booting up the Raspberry Pi and configuring it
Section 3: Configuring wireless networking
Section 4: Cleaning up and updating the operating system
Section 5: Installing MagicMirror² & Configuring Raspberry Pi for MagicMirror²
Section #: … beer?

Folks, please keep in mind that all of us have jobs, some of us are still in school, all of us have a life, all of us have other things to do that is not MagicMirror. I know that @paviro has moved recently and is still settling down into a new place. MagicMirror is probably far lower on the list of things to do at the moment for him. I’ve had a bad life event happen recently and have been absent from everything this past month or so and am just now starting to catch up on things. I’m not ready to jump into anything right away. Some days I’m perfectly fine, other days I’m doubled over crying somewhere, unable to do anything, and this is no joke. And @MichMich, I can’t even imagine all the things he does that we don’t know (and I’m not even talking about his harem.)

Point is, there are several aspects of the code that we are aware of that will need some debugging, fixing, or perhaps simply light on fire and start over. I know that, and I’m sure the other guys know that too. Free time isn’t something that we have in abundance. It comes when it comes, and I try to make use of it when I have it. I can’t speak for the others.

A little patience will go along way. I am certain @paviro will get to coding again when he’s available to do that. And eventually, I too will do the same. For now though, just try to keep the boat floating and stick your fingers into any leak you see springing up …

Have you updated your Raspberry Pi lately?

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo rpi-update
$ sudo reboot

Note that the firmware update will cause the reboot step to take longer than normal. Just don’t think your rpi is stuck and yank the power cord. Let it sit there for a bit. Mine took a good 2 minutes before it finally rebooted. The SD card access light was flickering quite a bit, meaning it was doing a lot of writing and configuring after the update.

And don’t forget to also request the most recent git copy of MagicMirror² as well:

$ cd magicMirror
$ git pull

Well fine, since we’re showing pictures …

Where am I from (originally)?
It looks like this when you go to the beaches:

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Where am I from (currently)?
It looks like this when you look west:

Reading your posts and your code, there are two things that stand out for me, one is that you are really trying, you want to figure it out, and you are doing everything you can think of to make things work. That is something I look for in any and all of the kids I teach in school: the desire to want to try and figure things out and not just memorize the book and regurgitate it back up later. The other side of that is that as hard as you are trying, you are struggling with it and a lot of it is because there seems to be a lack of understanding how the underlying code works and in some cases, even the simple fundamentals of JavaScript.

While looking at other people’s code is certainly a possibility, for what you are trying to do, that isn’t working so well. You have unfortunately also picked a harder to implement system than many others. My recommendation is to start with something simple first, try to understand how the system works, how a module gets integrated into the core system, how a module works on its own, how does it communicate with the outside world if it needs to. I recommend reading the module development page and work through that. Start small.

I’m not here to discourage you from what you are attempting to do, it is certainly possible to do what you want, but at the same time I also want to try and guide you, rather than just telling you ‘this is wrong’, ‘do that’, etc., etc. No one learns from that.

In your post you mentioned both wanting the maps integration, and also voice control. Those are two completely different systems, and require completely different controls. Do things one at a time. Either do the voice control part first, and get that working (you don’t need the ‘maps’ feature for this). You can always come back later and add to it. Or, do the maps integration first, and get that working the way you want it to. Integrating a button is by far the easiest way to have some kind of interaction between the mirror and the user. A simple button push can do something, like for example, display an alert message. So get that working, push button, alert message pops up (‘Hi, you pushed my button!’). Again, you can always change it later to say, trigger the display of a map. Whichever you do first, just pick one and get it working, and get it working correctly and have it stable, not just ‘it works sometimes’ …

Small steps, one at a time, together they form a bigger achievement. You can do it.

I said I was not going to write any code this weekend. Really, I did. But when thinking of a simple calendar display, it was way easier for me to just sit down and fiddle. This is still in its infancy, but this is what I’m working on for now. It’s a simple, empty calendar display with nothing other than today highlighted. It is still the same (default) calendar module. You just pick which you want displayed, either a blank one, or one where you configure your calendar URLs for it to fetch the data. At least, this is what I did for now. I may end up pulling it out and into a separate module, together with the weekly display one that I’m also working on.

There’s no formatting present, in fact it’s all done with tables, something I am going to change as I really don’t like tables. Much easier to format when you’re dealing with CSS elements. But at least I can give you a taste of what it looks like so far.

Just the blank calendar:

And if I stack them:

Comments/Suggestions/Requests/Questions … let 'em rip.

Things still todo:

• Replace table with CSS elements
• Allow for proper language translation
• Cosmetics

Last night I got home and decided I wanted to tinker with some more on my MM² code. After some lines were written, I popped a browser open … and saw no change. Huh? Went back, double checked my code, refreshed the browser … nothing. Oookay, I started adding debug lines and commenting out others. Still nothing, no debug, no console, no change, anywhere. Well this is annoying … the mirror is still running, but it seems none of my changes are taking. Ok, so maybe I need to restart the process. So I popped open another SSH session, logged in, and hit 'pm2 restart MM'. Boom, the mirror restarts no problems. But what’s this? Even on the mirror I don’t see my code changes. Did the rpi suddenly get corrupted and it can’t read data? Crap. Time to restart the rpi and do a file systems check. That came back fine, memory test, fine … so what gives? Flipped back to the first SSH window to check on code … yep still there. What’s going on?!

By now I was getting irritated so I did the next best thing I could think of: recloned everything from github, reset it all, and try again (from the first SSH window session - can you guess what’s going on here yet?.) Hit reload …ok, it comes up. Let’s make code changes again … nothing. No changes, it’s like all my code was being completely ignored.

So I flipped back to the second SSH session I had opened to start looking at the filesystem again and then it hit me … I’m working on the wrong device! UGH! The window title correctly tells me that I was on a different address, I just never looked UP to see it.

See, I have an identical installation on my office server, it’s an exact clone of the rpi at home. When I code at home, I push up to github, when I get to the office, I clone it back down. When I leave the office at the end of the day, I push changes up to github and when I get home, I reclone again. So the two devices always stay the same. In the first SSH session window, I was already logged into the one at the office, I just didn’t realize it. So all my code changes were being done there while I was trying to see the changes from the rpi at home.

It’s at that point I decided it’s time to just go to bed. :)

@opensky727, I haven’t touched MM in several months (other than the occasional git pull) so I’ll have to spend some time looking into it. In the mean time, if others can help, I’d appreciate it. Unfortunately I have one too many things going on at the same time here.

Guys, please read what I said above: it’s the way Moment.js calculates time. The actual module does not do any kind of time calculations, it simply passes the information to and from Moment.js.

If you want the calculations to be done different, then please write a new module, using a different library, and submit a PR request. All of MagicMirror uses the Moment.js library, for any kind of time calculations.

@bhepler is correct here. It calculates based on midnight. It’s in “one day” starting at “the next closest midnight”. That’s simply the way moment.js calculates time.

Jessie-light actually does not come with X11 nor any kind of desktop manager installed. The instructions given in the setup guide apply to the full version of Jessie, which comes with X11 and LightDM installed. Since the light version leaves it up to the user to install their own flavor of X11 and desktop manager, there is no way to guess what instructions we need to give so it works for you.

Perhaps if you indicated what you installed as desktop manager, someone here might be able to help you.

Flush the logs:
‘pm2 flush’

Restart the pi:
‘sudo reboot’

Check the pm2 logs again:
‘pm2 logs’

Did you try to launch it multiple times? That’s what pm2 is recording.

@ostfilinchen said in PM2 logs:

{ Error: listen EADDRINUSE :::8080
… snip …
code: ‘EADDRINUSE’,
errno: ‘EADDRINUSE’,
syscall: ‘listen’,
address: ‘::’,
port: 8080 }

You’re telling Mm to use a port that’s already being used for something else. If you actually have something that’s using port 8080, change Mm to use something else. It’s in the config.js file. For example, set it to 8585 …

If you don’t have or know what’s on port 8080, you have a bigger problem than either pm2 or MM.

@cpramhofer, not particularly stressed, just a matter of time … and life moving on.

Fail! I did not get time this weekend to try this. I got as far as downloading the new Raspbian image. I need to get another project done first, and it’s taking a lot of my time to complete. I will get to the testing, be patient.

@leisi said in Please help:

@darrene said in Please help:

sudo apt-get update

After the sudo apt-get update again i get following error again:
(connection via SSH from Mac / my OS is Raspbian Jessie)

pi@magicmirror:~ $ cd MagicMirror
pi@magicmirror:~/MagicMirror $ npm start

I lost count on how many times this has come up already. You can not start the mirror using that command when you are remotely SSHd into the rpi. The rpi simply does not know what monitor to use, yours, or the one connected to it. You have to tell it that:

DISPLAY=:0 npm start

Use the correct command, and then figure out what the problems are.