My Raspberry Pi mirror has shut off a few times by accident (overheated, lost power, etc). Every time I turned it back on it was kind of a pain - I had to take the mirror off the wall, hook up my keyboard and mouse, start up the mirror, etc. This happened enough that I wanted to automate a solution. I finally found this article and followed “method 2”. I thought I’d summarize here in case this can help anyone else.

What this will do

Start up your mirror whenever your raspberry pi gets turned on.

How?

We’ll utilize Raspian’s autostart mechanism to run a shell script whenever your Raspberry Pi starts up. The shell script will turn off sleep mode on your Pi and start your mirror.

1) Write a shell script

Create a shell script in the home directory. From the terminal, type:

$ vi /home/pi/start-mirror.sh

Copy this code into the start-mirror.sh file that was just opened, then save and close the file:

#!/bin/bash

sudo xset -dpms
sudo xset s off
cd /home/pi/MagicMirror && npm start

3) Create a .desktop file

This will utilize the autostart system on the pi. Your script will run after the desktop system starts up.

$ mkdir /home/pi/.config/autostart
$ vi /home/pi/.config/autostart/mirror.desktop        

Note: you might not need to run the first command to create the autostart directory - I already had this directory on my computer.

Copy this code into the mirror.desktop file and save it:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=MirrorStart
Exec=sh /home/pi/start-mirror.sh

After this saves, you’re all set. Reboot the pi and test it out:

sudo reboot

After the reboot you should see the Desktop pop up for 10-20 seconds, then your mirror should automatically start up.