Take a look at having the remote mirror set up a reverse SSH tunnel — that way you can reach it without having to change network settings on her end. You can pick a nonstandard port to open/forward on your end, and it can just automatically reach you. Installing MMM-Remote as a home screen “app” on her phone gives her controls without too much complication.

There’s also this solution which looks very promising, but I haven’t had the chance to check it out yet.

Also: take a look at a Chromecast-style WiFi manager, like this one. I use this particular one but it’s the same concept. That way if there are any network changes or whatever, she’s not left stranded mirror-wise. Also, it’s just extremely handy.

I’ll never say “don’t try an incredibly ambitious project!” because that’d just make me a hypocrite: however, I will say this:

Depending on what you actually want to do with it… you might now need to. I’ve been spending a good deal of time recently working on a setup with Home Assistant, and I used to have my instance on the same pi as my mirror. I honestly think that given the level of features that you want, you may want to look into just combining some projects with something like that – it’s open source still, but it allows your controls, remote access (provided you set up a reverse proxy or open a port), and a stupidly wide-ranging API. Mine also runs Homekit for interfacing with the family’s iPhones. and a custom Alexa skill that ties anything and everything “smart” together.

What does that have to do with the MagicMirror? Well, I’m working on it. For starters, a lot of control over the mirror itself is provided by the URL scheme setup by Jopyth’s wonderful Remote Control module. Right now I have it set up as a switch in HASS (so I can turn the display on/off easily), but I also can use HASS to send notifications to the mirror, automate hiding/content of various modules, etc! That’s all just with the URLs, not even getting into more advanced stuff – I’m working on a module that allows autodiscovery of a Mirror as an MQTT device. With the touch controls built into a lot of modules, you can already control lots of smart home things, and given the expensive API, I’m SURE that you or someone else could write a great module to control HASS directly. Even with what’s available now, it should be pretty straightforward to use the rEST API module to tell HASS (or openHAB, or Domoticz!) to toggle lights, set scenes, activate scripts, etc.

The nice thing about HASS is that it’s written in python and is pretty easily extensible! The bad thing is that it’s configured via YAML. There’s a learning curve, and it takes some tinkering – but then, if you’re gonna try and build an OS, I figure you’re already ready for that.

@gregoryorciuch I just remembered – are you using a PIR sensor? It seems like that’s been the source of the problem for a lot of people, and there seems to be a fix. Unfortunately, I am not so that doesn’t impact me and I didn’t remember to mention it.

@gregoryorciuch Yeah, it’s an ugly solution, but it works! I’d do the same, but my screen is blanking after about 25 minutes at most, and I just can’t justify a full reboot ever half hour.

@gregoryorciuch I am in the exact same boat as you, and I have not had any luck as of yet. Tried the normal overlay and the “fake” kms, to no avail. To be honest, I’ve just given up for a little bit until people that know what they’re doing have found a solution or the drivers are more stable. I might just do a fresh raspbian install and start anew, to see if that fixes things.

As a side note that doesn’t help much right now, using ‘vcgencmd monitor_on’ (or ‘off’) if you’re able is much, much better than ‘tvservice’.

Bumping this because I’m also having issues. A lot of time on google says it’s not just a MagicMirror issue, but lots of people have problems with the OpenGL drivers. My screen is blanking after some time no matter what, but I also found the hard way that it messes with tvservice (like the Remote Control module uses) – turning my HDMI off straight up insta-shut down my pi! Gonna have to keep researching for sure.

@MyMirror Oh my goodness – maybe my phrasing was off but I don’t mean share your account – trust me, I know exactly how that’ll go and it’s not pretty! I just mean, like with Wunderlist, make a separate account for everybody, but make a few specific lists shared, so that everyone can access or see them. For example, we have a “grocery list” that anyone can update, and a “house projects” list that lets me update what needs to be done, and other people just check that.

So you could have (on either service!) a “Kid 1 Chores” and a “Kid 2 chores” list. Each would be set to share with only them, but you could update it and they could check it/complete tasks as they do them. That’s really the beauty of the tasks apps is how much you can do with shared lists. Otherwise you’re stuck logging in and out of accounts on every machine you use, and that’s no fun!

If you want to DM me your wunderlist config, I’ll see if I can help with it. I have no idea why else it might not be working.

@potts-mike For the accessToken, there should not be any brackets, just quotation marks. That’s my bad, I typed it out that way without even thinking about the fact that java config does, in fact, actually use brackets.

As for spaces, I don’t think you need any. I’m not sure that they’ll mess anything up, though, but I could be wrong. Worth trying if taking out the brackets around the token doesn’t fix your problem.

@MyMirror That’s exactly what I’m working on getting set up as well! While it should be technically possible to pull lists from multiple accounts on one mirror, I’m not sure you really need to?

As far as I can see it, the easiest option is simply to keep your account hooked up to the mirror and just use shared lists. Since you already want to be able to share the grocery list and assign tasks to the kids, that means those relevant lists will already be shared/accessible from your account – so just drop in another instance of the module in your config, and change the header and the project values to whatever is relevant. (You can also have several projects together, with different project colors to distinguish whose chores are whose!). Mine (with badly maintained personal and work lists) looks like this:

If that doesn’t work for you, then it should be possible to pull from other accounts, but you’ll have to go through the process of making a developer account and getting a test API key for each one you plan on using. This also means that each person’s list(s) must be on separate instances of the module, and can’t be combined at all (since each API key can only access data for its own account). You can have several projects from one account in each instance, but not multiple accounts.

As for the projectColors value: to be honest, I started mine awhile back by copy/pasting from an example, and when it worked, I decided to just… not mess with it. My understanding is that, at least with that build, the projectColors bit was to specify what colors to display to correlate with the ones built into the Todoist clients.

@MyMirror Okay. If all else fails, try a clean install of the modules – delete the folder, re-clone from github, and npm install from inside the folder. I have no idea why stuff gets messed up but that’s fixed weird problems for me before! In the meantime, I’ll post my configs for these two modules. ***Note: for security, I’ve taken out the actual values of my keys. It’ll look right enough for you to pop in yours, but if you copy my config in, it won’t work without you replacing the access keys!

Todoist: Without spinning up a webserver to go through the whole Oauth procedure (having to login and capture account-specific access keys, which is a pain), the devs actually give you an API key that gives you full access to your account only, found on their dev console here. This is what they call their “Test Token” and that’s what you want to use for your mirror. You don’t have to worry about the Client ID and Client Secret. Just the test token.

		{
			module: "MMM-Todoist",
			position: "top_right",
			disabled: false,
			header: "Todoist",
			config: {
				accessToken: "[Todoist Test Token]",
				maximumEntries: 60,
				updateInterval: 90000,
				projects: [
					2162182105,
					2162182104,
					2162182107,
					2163342228
				],
				projectColors: [
					"#95ef63",
					"#ff8581",
					"#ffc471",
					"#f9ec75",
					"#a8c8e4",
					"#d2b8a3",
					"#e2a8e4",
					"#cccccc",
					"#fb886e",
					"#ffcc00",
					"#74e8d3",
					"#3bd5fb",
					"#dc4fad",
					"#ac193d",
					"#d24726",
					"#82ba00",
					"#03b3b2",
					"#008299",
					"#5db2ff",
					"#0072c6",
					"#000000",
					"#777777"
				],
				fade: false,
				orderBy: "todoist"
			}
		},

My config is above, but you’ll need to replace my project IDs with your own, or it will error out, since they don’t match any projects (lists) on your account. The instructions for grabbing those are here and that explains it better than I can.

Wunderlist: Their authentication is slightly different here, but no big deal. This time around, on your developer page, they give you a Client ID and a Client Secret for each “app” you’ve registered (I only have the one, which is this mirror). No matter, we just have to include both those values in the config, instead of just the one. For the record, I’m using the MMM-Wunderlist module by paviro, not the WunderlistEnhanced version. I’m pretty sure the config for them is similar, but I don’t actually know. Here’s my config:

	{
			module: "MMM-Wunderlist",
			position: "top_left",
			header: "Daily To-Do",
			disabled: false,
			config: {
				accessToken: "[client secret, which is very long]",
				clientID: "[Client ID]",
				lists: [
					"Daily",
					"Party Prep"
				],
				interval: 90,
				fadepoint: 0.5,
				maximumEntries: 16
			}
		},

Now, one thing that I just remembered having issues with (I set this up a ways back and it’s been awhile since I really looked over my config!) is the list names for this one. The nice thing about this module is that you don’t have to go pull List ID numbers out of URLs, but the unfortunate thing is that the names that you type in have to match exactly. When mine suddenly stopped working, it took me like an hour of yanking hairs out before I realized that I’d renamed one of my lists to fix the capitalization and didn’t update it accordingly on the mirror.

I just checked and both modules are working just fine for me with these configs. Hopefully that gets you up and running.