unreal4u

unreal4u

Hi all!

After a bit of work and quite some waiting, all pieces arrived and I gave an old notebook’s screen with a broken motherboard new life in the form of an informational screen just next to my frontdoor.

Before that, the requirements were that the screen had to be as unobstructive as possible so it had to be thin, and it had to look good on the wall as well, without any cables in sight. As a bonus, if it had the possibility to get a view of my living room it would be a nice touch.

The final result is this:
Final result

But first things first, I had to plan it first:

Planning

Cutting the slot for the screen

General shape

Butchering the door

Electronics

After some initial testing, I decided to paint the frame and insert the webcam:

Inserting webcam

Frontal view

After assembling everything, this was the end result:

Close-up of final result

Used hardware:

Some wood, black paint and quite some tools
An old HP Pavillion DV6000 screen, which is actually a Samsung LTN154X3-L01
The corresponding driver and a 12v/5A PSU for it (way overkill but I’m pretending to use that same PSU for some other stuff in the future)
rpi4 4GB

Software used:

Magic Mirror running via Docker (I want to install a magic mirror upstairs as well so it should use the same server. This pi also runs 15 other images as well, I don’t want to install anything on it except for Docker)
Firefox-esr with an add-on that allows the browser to start up full screen. I tried Chromium in kiosk mode, but it displayed a message after a while stating that it couldn’t be updated. Didn’t want to spent more time in it, so went the easy way.
To turn the screen on or off I wrote a small bash script and I used node-red for the actual programming of it.
MQTT
Home Assistant

Modules:

MMM-bustimes
MMM-Buienradar
MMM-BurnIn
MMM-CalendarExt2
MMM-DailyAlarm
MMM-IndoorTemperature-Endpoint
MMM-RandomPhoto
MMM-TomTomTrafficIncidents

Pending improvements:

Integrate MMM-MQTT into the monitor so that I can display some pieces of information directly on the screen
Integrate MMM-iFrame or MMM-iFrame-Ping so that I can display some grafana graphics (I really like the gauge that Grafana produces)
Integrate MMM-Pages
Make another actual mirror which will be upstairs

I hope you liked this project as much as I enjoyed making it!

More photo’s and details can be found here: https://imgur.com/a/b3TcNSt

unreal4u

Sorry if this is a repeated question, but it is difficult to search for my query, mainly because “2 mirror” kind of clashes with “magic mirror 2” lol

Up until now, I’ve been running a mirror for a few months already without any major issue. I run the server as a Docker image on a rpi4 with one dummy browser attached to it. Now I want to have a second mirror upstairs with a totally different layout, so my question is: I’m I better off creating another Docker instance or can I pass on a configuration file of some sort through the url?

For example:
example.com:8099 => first mirror, picks up the default config
example.com:8099/?conf=upstairs => second mirror, combines default + custom ‘upstairs’ conf.

Is this possible? My preferred solution would be to use the same instance because I’ll be using the same API credentials for some stuff (and the same engine behind it), so I would like to have my configs on 1 place, otherwise I’ll just create another instance listening to another port.

Greetings.

unreal4u

What about ‘Gevoelstemp.’ ? I agree that Gevoelstemperatuur is a bit on the large side, but ‘Voelt als’ “feels” (see what I did there?) strange as well.

unreal4u

Hi everybody!

I currently have an event on my local MQTT server which provides me with the event that sun has risen or has set. This has different consequences around my house, specifically when the sun sets: curtains go down, ambiental lights go on (this last one obviously depending on whether we are home or not), staircase gets illuminated, etc.

I have a magic monitor (on display here) which I want it to be coordinated as well: whenever the sun sets, the theme should set to be a dark theme, otherwise during the day it should be a white(ish) theme.

I have currently overwritten some values in my CSS so that during the majority of the day it displays the light theme, but now I would like to go a step further and implement this so that after the sun sets, the screen is no longer so bright.

Now comes my question: how would you begin to do this? Has anybody already done this before? Can I use some existing implementation to read out MQTT and perform an operation based on such an event?

I can program comfortably (actually pretty new to nodejs!) but I’m just curious as to where to begin. Hopefully you can help me more.

Thanks and greetings.

unreal4u