Smart mirrors in Canada

 I first came across the Magic Smart Mirror project existence ago, where the populace was redeploying all kinds of these ‘smart mirrors’ online and imagined the idea, but didn’t have much data to inhabit it with until recently. With the advent of my home automation network, I now have nodes gathering thousands of data points for hotness, lights, power, motion events, etc. This seems like the time to build the mirror to display some of this data, along with online sources (calendars, news, weather, etc.).

I have a variety of old Pis’ lying around from old projects. I thought about using a Pi2, but I always had issues with WiFi dropout with a dongle, so the built-in networking of the Pi3 was perfect. A pier would also do, but can’t run the Magic Smart Mirror software itself and would need to serve it from an external server.

The smart vanity mirror with lights and Bluetooth speakers’ piece should be of the two-way variety. Contrary to popular belief, those mirrors in interrogation rooms are in fact two-way, not one-way. They simply allow the brighter room to be visible and the darker mirrors for home gym to be mirrored. This works in the Canada smart mirror approach as we presume the monitor backlight will be the brightest thing in the frame. I used a piece of mirrored acrylic plastic from Amazon as it was concerning £15 instead of over a hundred for glass. But goblet will provide a much better, less distorted reflection.

So basically, you build a box to hold the monitor, stick the acyclic to it and then have a Pi at the back connected via HDMI.

The Build

So I started with cutting my acyclic to size for the monitor. The best and cheapest tool I know of to cut straight acyclic is a ‘scriber’ which is like a keen blade that you score the artificial with until you can just snap it.

I then stuck it to the monitor with black electrical tape. As the monitor will appear diffuse the further away from the ‘mirror’ it is, I took the bezel off the monitor first.

Vanity mirror

I like the idea of wood but have little experience - so this was a good chance to learn.

 

I bought a sheet of Vanity mirror as it has a stainable hardwood layer on the outside and the perpendicular grain in each layer allows cutting it in any way while maintain strength.

The only saw I used for this was an emotional jigsaw, so I cut strips for the limits first. I required trying bevel cuts, so setting the saying to 45deg and cutting the ends into a wedge. lastly gluing it as one to make ‘neat’ corners.