My Own DIY Smart Mirror

I first started seeing the potential of technology during my first job in Boston. I worked in the tech scene and was surrounded by people who were full of ideas. And not just ideas, but skills to act on them.

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B is on the back of my smart mirror. You can see where gpio pins are soldered to the buttons.

I want to share one of my more recent projects, a Smart Mirror. I had been wanting to learn about hardware, and then I came across the medium post “My Bathroom Mirror is Smarter than Yours.” I decided it could be a fun project to play around with the Raspberry Pi. I reached out to a friend with experience with the Pi and asked if he’d mentor me throughout this project. He agreed (Dan Westman is awesome!). Thus it began: the making of a smart mirror.

Tools used: Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, a monitor, mirrored plexiglass, wood and paint to build frame, buttons and miscellaneous equipment.

Technologies: Raspbian Wheezy, Node/Express, Angular, GpiO, ImageMagick, apicache, BASH, OmxPlayer, moment.js, Bing Static Map with traffic layer, Midori Browser

The first button starts up a video with OMXPlayer.

APIs: The New York Times, Forecast.io, Google Calendar, TheySaidSo

There are 3 buttons with the GPIO pins. The first button starts up a video with OMXPlayer. The second button is an explanation of the project. The third tells the current IP address, mainly for developer use for when I ssh into the server.

The second button is an explanation of the project and the third tells the current IP address.

I used set intervals to update each api individually. I’m updating the forecast.io api every two minutes, the bing map with traffic layer every five minutes, quote api every six hours, etc.

My favorite part is the traffic map

A new quote appears every day.

The smart mirror can connect to my home wifi or my iphone hotspot.

This project took around two weeks to complete. I am amazed at the low cost and amount of ways you can use the raspberry pi. Thanks again to Dan Westman, who taught me all about gpio pins, BASH forever loops and power tools :)

Last week, I graduated from the Nashville Software School. I think this smart mirror was a great starting point in understanding the potential for new technologies with the Pi. Now that I’ve learned how to do all of this through NSS, I hope to keep furthering my skills and finally start creating things that really matter.

Check out my other projects on github or checkout the code for this project.

You can find me at amylee.co or am.ylee on instagram.