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Smart Mirror

This began as a passion project after reading an article about the top Raspberry Pi DIY projects. It evolved into quite a useful central information center used by the entire family. What makes the mirror so smart is its integration with various cloud services and IoT devices. It is based on the fantastic open source MagicMirror project.

The physical device is made up of several key parts:

  • A 32" LCD TV used for the display
  • Two-way mirror glass with 20% light transmission
  • A Raspberry Pi 3
  • A motion sensor to detect when someone is standing in front of the mirror
  • An infra-red blaster to control the display
  • A microphone for voice control
  • A simple button for powering the display on and off
  • A wooden frame to make it all look beautiful

You can read all about the build over several blog posts:

Information Modules

While the software comes pre-loaded with several common modules – calendar, weather, news, etc. – its real power lies in its ability to incorporate community generated custom modules. Jeff wrote several custom modules to tailor the mirror to his own needs.

  • A calendar module that improves the UI design over the standard calendar module
  • A weather module that integrates with Weather Underground
  • A traffic module using Google's Traffic API that shows you your expected commute time
  • A scoreboard module for major North American leagues including NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB, CFL, MLS, NCAA College Football and Basketball.
  • A calendar for Toronto's waste pick-up schedule
  • A module that integrates with Wink's Smart Home Hub to monitor and display door and garage lock status
  • A schedule module for Toronto transit, and a spin-off module that will work with any transit system that uses the NextBus API
  • A multi-lingual Word Clock module that is displayed after the motion sensor stops detecting the presence of someone standing in front of the mirror
  • A Word of the Day module that shows a new obscure word along with its definition and pronunciation key
  • A module to display notes from a GMail account
  • A module to integrate Amazon Echo voice control

Read more about the custom modules here. Module source code can be downloaded from GitHub.

Word Clock

When the motion sensor stops detecting the presence of someone standing in front of the mirror after a period of time, the mirror transitions into a screen saver of sorts, and display the current time using words. Word Clock is inspired by QLOCKTWO.

Word Clock

See a live demo of Word Clock here.