Smart, technology filled bathrooms are inevitably coming, but until then, be the first in your group of friends to make your very own smart mirror!
Gaining popularity in recent months, it’s not that difficult to make a smart mirror. In fact, it’s really just an LCD monitor with a one-way mirror slapped on top. Similar to how Infinity Mirrors work.
The build makes use of an older LCD monitor [Tmonaco189] had laying about. He went to the hardware store and picked up some wood to build a frame that would fit the aspect ratio of the monitor perfectly — and of course to be large enough to cover up the rear casing of the monitor. Once built, it was time to make it smart!
A Raspberry Pi is used to feed data to the screen, including weather, the calendar, and an RSS feed of Reddit. To save power, he’s added a motion sensor to the GPIO of the Pi, which means it’ll actually boot up when you walk into the room, and turn off when you leave — nice.
We’ve seen quite a few smart mirrors before, but we gotta wonder — how long before we see these as a commercial product you can buy? Are they already available?
[via r/DIY]
Clearly a rebuild of http://hackaday.com/2014/05/01/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall/
The PIR sensor blends perfectly with the frame!
Also the soldering can’t go unmentioned…
Facial recognition would be better than PIR.
Except who would want an internet-connected device with an always-on camera in their bathroom… And good luck in the dating world when you explain why there is a camera behind the mirror to your date.
Well when I saw the title of the article thats what I thought, facial recognition. And as for the whole hidden camera in the bathroom, who tells about that anyway?
You don’t need to connect to the Internet to do image recognition. (or voice recognition for that matter)
No but you do for the weather feeds, RSS feed, and some of the other data people like to display.
If hey can handle the computer behind the mirror I do not think this will be a problem.
I do not not get the worry since this is all open source it is under the control of the user/owner.
…and this is where we discover that the RPi does not have proper power modes, nor standby, nor power off. You can halt it, but it will still happily draw its ~400mA and will not respond till you power-cycle it. Then it reboots which obviously takes ages… About the only point I really do hate about that nice piece of hardware.
1) An attiny and a relay solves that completely, minus sleep.
2) Ages? Literally every Pi OS I have tested(most of them) has a cold boot time in the 30 second range. Am I missing something?
30 seconds is “ages” when waiting for a smartmirror to start being smart – unless you’re the kind of person that spends 5-10 minutes fixing your hair and touching up your smudged makeup everytime you pass by a mirror….
That. Having proper standby or suspend would make that a non problem, but afaik those do not work on the Pi…
Who runs into the bathroom just to stare at the mirror? And if you do then you are more concerned about your reflection than any extra content. Reality is more likely that the motion sensor will pick up other activities and by the time you look at the mirror, everything else is there.
I think this is a great project! Some possible additions:
Add a RFID tag to everyone’s key chain and messages can be more personal.
Add time of day (can easily be pulled off the NET) and now you can add good morning, evening, etc.
Decode day of week and time the mirror could say “Why are you up so early?” on Saturday mornings before 9 AM.
Pick up weather alerts and display weather maps.
Why does he even need sleep modes when you’ve got the thing AC-powered? Seriously, this power-saving thing is bollocks, with 300mA at 5V my latest Pi needs you don’t really need to shutdown it – make it responsive instead,
Agreed, would make more sense to power down the monitor completely, since it uses more power, and can start up again in a few seconds
That seems to be exactly what he is doing. From the end of the imgurl page:
“Walking into the room boots the monitor up. Leaving powers the monitor down after 10 seconds of inactivity. The Raspberry remains powered up.”
At 400mA, he’ll be wasting up to $2.50 of electricity per year! The horror!
But that can be reduced, without a sleep mode. Disable unneeded LEDs, turn off unneeded systems, and choose a RPi that doesn’t have unneeded peripherals. The RPi0 can run below 100mA.
+1
I’m all for conservation and all but to harp on a draw such as that is mute, unless the goal was to make it energy star rated
If you’ve got some low power smarts controlling power to the Pi you can also shut it down during times you know you won’t need the smart mirror.
I know for sure that when I’m at work or in the wee hours of the morning I won’t care what my mirror is doing, and even if you wanna compensate for that, some presence type sensors in other rooms can keep things anticipating your next move.
I’m waiting for someone to build one with voice recognition, and an animated face in sync with text to speech for responses. The phrase “Mirror, mirror, on the wall” should trigger the voice recognition routine to start.
I was thinking of that with face recognition as well so it customizes for the user. The other thing would be the joke potential of it. Someone looks in the mirror and then they see a ghost in the mirror behind them or maybe a Klingon beam in behind them and take a swing at them.
Nice invention and I would like encourage your thinking. Do you just make it for you or so? I think this kind of similar product are there at the market but the price is too high to purchase them at all. So think about your price and I think it will take the place right over there. Thanks for sharing the invention.
By the way I love those arms are you sure your a nerd LOL.