Best posts made by tshort

This not-a-mirror is a nabi Big Tab 20" Android tablet that I mounted to my refrigerator. I got the tablet for $150. Unfortunately, it looks like it’s discontinued (link). The tablet was designed for kids, but it works great for this application. The tablet has a frame around it with holes. That makes it easy to mount to the refrigerator with sheet metal screws.

My setup uses MMM-ProfileSwitcher and MMM-TouchNavigation. The main parts include:

• home – This shows the clock, weather, a kitchen timer, a calendar, and a slideshow on the right. The slideshow is an IFrame that connects to ZenPhoto running on a server. Because it’s a full-featured photo CMS, you can run different slideshows and search based on keyword or date.

• food – Contains more timers and an IFrame pointing to allrecipes.com.

• weather – More weather details on the left with MMM-WunderGround and an IFrame pointing to a wunderground page.

I use MagicMirror in server mode running on a server. To set up the tablet, I rooted it with KingoRoot and installed the full!screen app. That works great to fill the whole screen. Firefox is the best browser for this. You can adjust the DPI to match desktop, and you can nudge it to hide the top bar. With the full!screen app, you can still go to the home screen easily, so it’s pretty easy to jump to other Android apps.

Here’s the kitchen timer module I made to go with this:

https://github.com/tshort/MMM-KitchenTimer

Overall, I like the way it turned out. I still need to decorate it to better to hide the cord and protect it from the fridge door hitting the wall on the side. Some other features would be nice:

• Alexa integration – I have an Echo Dot in the room. It’d be nice to be able to show the song being played or the status of the current timer. I tried putting alexa.amazon.com in an IFrame, but that didn’t work.

• Alternatives to pictures – We’ll probably get tired of family pictures, so I’ll have to look for other options (nature scenes, comics, etc.).

The main glitch I’ve run into is that sometimes the tablet won’t stay asleep. I haven’t figured out what keeps waking it up. It’ll go long stretches where it’s fine then it 'll have times where it won’t sleep for more than five seconds.

Re: Fridge-mounted display

After getting a new fridge, I wasn’t allowed to drill into it, so I redid my fridge-mounted display. I used a $200 Surface Pro 3 from Ebay (the cheapest model I could find). Here’s what it looks like:

The SP3 works great as a fridge display. The screen is bright and high resolution, and the power cable is small and easy to attach. It’s smaller than my earlier tablet, so I abandoned my approach of using MagicMirror as the desktop. Instead, I start the following Chromium windows and use the windows hardware key on the right side of the tablet to switch between them:

• MagicMirror
• AllRecipes.com
• DarkSky.com
• Slideshow with family photos (points to ZenPhoto running on another server)
• Generic google screen

All but the last of these, I run in fullscreen mode. The base operating system is Ubuntu 18.10. The latest Ubuntu works quite well on the SP3. I haven’t found anything that doesn’t work. It has an on-screen keyboard for typing. I use separate Chromium windows for everything. I already had MagicMirror installed on another server, so I just pointed a browser window at that.

To attach the tablet, I used four of these magnets. I attached them with Gorilla Glue and brushed on two coats of Plasti Dip. The Plasti Dip decreases the magnetic force some, and it protects the fridge from scratches. Don’t use too much Gorilla Glue. I made that mistake on the first couple, and it makes a mess. You can wipe it off, but some of the excess sticks around. Because of the magnets inside the SP3, the external magnets try to move around as you are gluing them. For the magnets on the kickstand, it helped to fold it out and place magnets on the back side of the kickstand to hold those on the other side. For those on the top of the SP3, I tried to find places they wouldn’t move and set a book on top as they dried. Here is a picture of the back:

The tablet still works well when detached, and it’s easy to take it on and off the fridge. Overall, this is an easy project. I spent a bit of time tweaking Ubuntu, but it wasn’t bad. If you’re happy with Windows, you could even go with that. I really wanted to put ChromiumOS on here, but both the ArnoldTheBat and CloudReady distributions have older kernels and don’t work as well as the latest Ubuntu on the Surface Pro.

One remaining item I’d like to try is motion detection to turn the screen on and off.

@shashank here’s my config.js:

https://gist.github.com/tshort/3b17983003f3fe6eb94987707052e307

Note that you’ll have to fill in keys for the weather links.

I did need to modify MagicMirror code to be able to use the MMM-ProfileSwitcher like tabs. Here’s an issue I filed on it (closed with not-fixed as this usage isn’t supported):

https://github.com/MichMich/MagicMirror/issues/889

Here are the changes I made to get around that problem:

diff --git a/js/main.js b/js/main.js
index 6aa313a..1ece53d 100644
--- a/js/main.js
+++ b/js/main.js
@@ -191,7 +191,9 @@ var MM = (function() {
                if (moduleWrapper !== null) {
                        moduleWrapper.style.transition = "opacity " + speed / 1000 + "s";
                        moduleWrapper.style.opacity = 0;
-                       moduleWrapper.style.cssText = "z-index: -99";
+                       moduleWrapper.style.position = "absolute";
+                       moduleWrapper.style.left = "-9000px";
+                       // moduleWrapper.style.cssText = "z-index: -99";

                        clearTimeout(module.showHideTimer);
                        module.showHideTimer = setTimeout(function() {
@@ -199,7 +201,9 @@ var MM = (function() {
                                // since it's fade out anyway, we can see it lay above or
                                // below other modules. This works way better than adjusting
                                // the .display property.
-                               moduleWrapper.style.position = "fixed";
+                               // moduleWrapper.style.position = "fixed";
+                       // moduleWrapper.style.position = "absolute";
+                       // moduleWrapper.style.left = "-1000px";

                                updateWrapperStates();

@@ -252,7 +256,9 @@ var MM = (function() {
                        // Waiting for DOM-changes done in updateWrapperStates before we can start the animation.
                        var dummy = moduleWrapper.parentElement.parentElement.offsetHeight;
                        moduleWrapper.style.opacity = 1;
-                       moduleWrapper.style.cssText = "z-index: 99";
+                       // moduleWrapper.style.position = "relative";
+                       moduleWrapper.style.left = "0px";
+                       // moduleWrapper.style.cssText = "z-index: 99";

                        clearTimeout(module.showHideTimer);
                        module.showHideTimer = setTimeout(function() {

After using this a while, everyone seems to like the main screen a lot. They don’t use the food or weather tabs much. The food tab is a bit glitchy, and the weather tab doesn’t always update. I’ll probably look for better options for these two.

As far as the tablet failing to sleep, that went away after a factory reset and reinstall.