A mirror with a higher transmission should also reduce the backlight bleeding since you won’t have to increase the brightness as much, creating a better black and therefore having better contrast.

@yep_dd You could use relay with a small delay to power your backlight. So the screen will only be visible after the “HDMI1” box disappeared. Personally I wouldn’t bother with it, though.

@adrien That should still be possible with the script method described in 5.1. Instead of the power lines for the controller board of the LCD you use the cables that lead to your backlight.

I don’t know what LCD you have. Some have an extra inverter or LED driver board. You can take the cables from there. Some have a 40 pin LVDS cable (instead of 30 pin), so you have to check the datasheet which wires are for the backlight. I’d take the VCC wire for the backlight, snip it and connect both lose ends to the relay. That should work.

Keep in mind that with this method the LCD is always on, only the backlight is off.

@adrien check out this forum thread. cruunnerr explains different methods on how to turn on/off your screen. He helped me setting up my system which uses a relay and PIR-sensor to power on/off my LCD. I think that’s what you’re looking for.

@striiker Could it be the screensaver? Have you tried updating to 2.5.0 or downgrading to 2.3.x? I am pretty sure I didn’t have the problem with 2.3. In my case it’s enough to reload the MM only once a day. Also I had noticed that my Pi was reeeeeeeaaaaaaallllllyyyyyyy slow when connecting via shh after the screen blanked. Slow to the point I thought it crashed. Pretty sure it was a memory leak or so.

I haven’t updated to 2.5 yet as I want to wait and see what problems other users experience

Never got it to display anything. Page could not load or something like that. Not on the Pi0 and also not remotely on another PC. After many attemps and long hours of troubleshooting and reading I finally gave up on it.

I really would love to get it working though as I’d like to make another cheap mirror for my brother as a present. Still have a two-way-mirror lying around…

Why are you running the update command with sudo?
Does your mirror work but it blanks the screen after some hours or is it always black?

@graham-rich to update your MM installation you have to enter your MM directory and run git pull && npm install. Looks like you tried to update npm instead.

@striiker 0 6 * * * pm2 reload mm
It reloads my mm.sh script every day at 6am. Working perfectly fine for quite some time now.

@teitlebot Of course. Just wanted to show a possible “cheapest” way. It always depends on your budget and skills/age of your students.

No need to go for the LCD controller board path if you get working screens.

I think you have to be lucky to get an old eeePC for just $11. Let alone multiple of those. Have a look into RasPi alternatives like Orange Pi. They are a bit cheaper and I think there’s a forum thread here somewhere of people running MM on it. The Pi0 would be probably the cheapest alternative but I’ve never managed to run MM on it…

Of course a cheap laptop is the easiest way to go if you can get enough for cheap. An old laptop for $25 is still cheaper than a RasPi and already comes with power supply and screen.