I use the cheapest SSD I could get for my Pi at that time. It’s running non-stop for 2 years without any issues. You can get 120GB SSD’s for less than 20€. A SATA-USB adapter costs around 2€ from China. Maybe that’s an option for you.
SD cards are not designed to be permanently written to. They wear out too fast.

@Preve Hi there!
The Other day I installed MM on the latest Linux Mint and it worked without any issues. All I did before the npm installwas to run curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | sudo -E bash - which was poested by @Mykle1 poested in this post. There were no errors during the installation. Give it a try and report back if that worked for you.

Ok, ust for fun I installed MM an the Atomic Pi and the installation went through without a problem. MM runs pretty smooth, although I haven’t installed any demanding modules.

I also installed windows 10 on an external SSD, connected via the USB 3.0 port. It works and runs okay but I hoped it would feel a bit faster. Not sure if the USB drive is to blame or the CPU. I’d like to test a slimmed down LTSB version but I couldn’t get my hands on an iso

I have no experiences with any offline speech recognition modules but I’ll get into it in July. I won’t really have the time to play around with it at the moment.

Any other modules I should try?

It’s powered with 5V via the GPIO pins. I soldered a barrel jack to a pin header to power the Atomic Pi. This is one of the flaws and quirks… They do sell different breakout boards but they weren’t available when I ordered my Pi.

I didn’t have too much time playing with it software wise. I was doing some soldering to extend the number of USB ports and to power the thing. However, I have successfully installed Linux Mint and it is running smooth. Ubuntu should run well, too.

Maybe I’ll try installing MM tomorrow and report back but I can’t promise to find the time for it. Also, I am not really a programmer (at all!) so I’ll stay away from the GPIO pins for now (until I can copy what others have done ).

My summary so far: it does have some flaws and quirks but for the price it is amazing.

Hi all,

I am surprised nobody is talking about the Atomic Pi yet.
It’s a x86 SBC that cost around the same as a Raspberry Pi but instead comes with 16GB eMMC storage, 2GB of RAM and an Intel Atom CPU, and USB3. You can find it here.

I ordered mine last week when it was only $35 (now ~$39, they are popular, prices will probably go up a bit more) and I received it yesterday in Germany. Including shipping and import fees I paid something around 43€.

They are in and out of stock all the time but right now they’re in stock. Don’t wait too long to place an order…

Before I try MM on it I’ll probably play around a bit using different OS, especially Windows 10.

I thought this could be of interest for some users. I know there’re always plenty of people looking for a more performant SBC and this could be it.

You have to execute npm startin the MagicMirror directory, not in the home directory of your user pi. E.g. do cd MagicMirror (or /home/pi/MagicMirroror whatever your MM directory is) and then run npm start.

@mytamhuyet What? Why would it power down without being told to do so. My mirror runs for months without a restart.

Glad it worked!

This is my crontab:

# daemon's notion of time and timezones.
#
# Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through
# email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected).
#
# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
#
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h  dom mon dow   command
0 6 * * * pm2 reload mm

Are you running crontab -ewith sudo? Because you have to run it as the user that runs MM (= most likely without sudo).

Edit: @Zwirbel: For me it works using a cronjob. See what I wrote above and if you have questions regarding crontab, just ask again.