I moved out of my family home recently, but found that there was no dressing-table mirror in my new flat *gasp*. Since moving out, my time-keeping has also taken a nosedive and I've found myself constantly being late, so to make living independently smoother and to solve such problems in one fell swoop, I made a smart mirror!
The mirror itself is a sheet of 2-way glass, custom cut to fit inside a cheap photo frame I got from Ikea. Unlike regular mirror glass it only reflects about 50% of light, but otherwise lets the rest through.
An old monitor hooked up to a Raspberry Pi lives behind the glass, and a simple web-app is displayed in kiosk mode. Once the mirror is in place (aka haphazardly balanced on the monitor), anything that isn't black shows through the glass.
The web-app, which can be found <a href="{{ "/graveyard/smrt" | prepend: site.baseurl }}" target="_blank">here, is what makes the mirror 'smart' — it includes the date and time, travel updates (TfL) to speed up my mornings, and the weather forecast (MetOffice) so that I leave the flat in weather-appropriate clothes.
If I ever get round to it, motion detection — to make the monitor switch itself on as someone walks by — would be a pretty awesome addition.
Update Jan 5th —
I shared this on Reddit. I think people
liked
it.