Project

This project is based on Michael Teeuw 's project. It's one of the most popular Raspberry Pi projects out there and it's actually practical. It's become part of my daily routine as I get ready in the mornings to glance at the weather, my calendar, and get a nice compliment while getting ready.

The display

One of the reasons for starting this project was that I had an extra monitor laying around. Unfortunately, it had to be fixed first. Opening the monitor case revealed two blown capacitors (shown on the 2nd pic on the left). Feeling lucky, I decided to replace the two capacitors with higher voltage rated ones and voilà! the monitor was fixed. Now it was time to get everything else ready.

The rest of the hardware

After the getting the monitor ready I needed a Raspberry Pi, HDMI to VGA connector, aux cable, 2-way mirror , wooden pieces and frame. One thing that I wasn't expecting is how flexible the shee of 2-way mirror is. It shipped to me fine but I realized it's fairly easy to bend during mounting and a slight twist of the sheet can result in fun house mirror effect. Definitely proceed with caution. The assembly process is pretty straightforward. The wood pieces will hold the monitor in place behind the 2-way mirror and the frame will go infront of that. For more details you can see Michael Teeuw's take on it.

Final thoughts

After getting all the hardware set up it was time to download the software. I temporarily connected a keyboard to the Pi, enabled remote connection, and downloaded the repository from the site. The basic functionality of the mirror was ready to go 'out of the box' but I added the links to my google calendar and my local weather. On my list are adding voice recognition, smart device connectivity, motion sensing for power savings, prank mode (to have a scary image pop up). Defintely alot of possible add-ons for this project.