We Built a Smart Mirror

This year my Dad and I built my sister a Smart Mirror for Christmas. It was his idea to build one and my idea to build it for Georgia. She lives in NYC now and if you don’t have a Smart Mirror in your NYC apartment are you really cool enough to live there 🤔 ? This isn’t a DIY manual with step-by-step instructions, just a little write up of our mirror.

Our mirror was of the simple variety. There is no voice control or any kind of touch. Just a good ol’ Raspberry Pi and a computer monitor. These mirrors are a lot easier to build than I thought. At the end of the day ours was just a website with a black background and white text running on localhost.

After looking at a handful of designs we settled on a pseudo-borderless, modern looking mirror. The mirror’s surface is two-way glass with a reflective laminate, and the frame is made out of wood that my Dad has been moving all over the country for like 40 years or something. It’s from the barn behind his childhood home. That pre-Internet wood could not have imagined what it has been turned into.

Shoutout to Mark for letting us use his shop to build the frame of our mirror. Here are some pictures of us working on the frame:

Here is everything put together after we got the glass:

And here’s the final product - mounted in Georgia’s apartment:

For anyone that is interested here are some links to different projects we drew from:

Magic Mirror
Raspberry Pi Smart Mirror
How to Make a Magic Mirror

Here’s the original version of the code that I borrowed:

Magic Mirror Dashboard

And here’s mine after I made a few changes:

https://github.com/spencexyz/smart-mirror