So, your smart mirror has been running for a while, but Halloween is coming up and you want to come up with some cool Halloween stuff to display on the mirror. If you’re looking for ideas, check out [Ben Eagan]’s cool Haunted Smart Mirror which connects the mirror via a Raspberry Pi with Amazon Alexa and Phillips Hue lighting.

[Ben] points to another of his blog pages for those readers interested in the nuances of setting up Alexa with a smart mirror, while concentrating on communication with the Hue bridge and creating the setup for a new Alexa command in this post. Dealing with the Phillips Hue API seems fairly straightforward: Get the IP address of your Hue bridge from your router and the ID of your lights from the Hue app and you’re set to send commands via HTTP. [Ben] includes a Python script to make the lights flicker, which you can modify for your own lights as you wish. Once that’s done, you’ll need to set up the intent that Alexa listens for, and then modify the AWS lambda function that sends commands to the Pi. When the command shows up in the queue on the Pi, any commands [Ben] wants to play are fired off – in this case, a video is played and the Hue lights start to flicker.

There’s no mention of security in the article, so that may be worth a little attention with Alexa and the Hue, but with Halloween coming up fast even if you haven’t built a magic mirror yet, if you’ve got Hue lights, this would be a great, quick, Halloween idea. Especially if you could combine it with your outside lights so that Trick-or-Treaters can join in on the fun. Maybe you’d prefer looking up passing planes using Alexa? Or how about getting your fish to talk?

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