I happen to be very involved with the Women in Computing organization at RIT. In particular I’m involved with Projects Committee, of which I’m the committee head. Every year the committee picks a project to do, this year we are doing a magic mirror or smart mirror. A magic mirror is a monitor usually hooked up to a raspberry pi where white text is displayed on a black background. The monitor is covered by a one way mirror, usually a piece of acrylic with one side see through and the other reflective. The white text shines through the see through side, creating the effect of a mirror surface that has useful text such as the time or the weather.

Our mirror currently uses the open source Magic Mirror software. Their tag line is “The open source modular smart mirror platform” which is truly the best way to sum it up. It takes care of most of the code for us. It has many useful modules that come by default like the time and date, calendar, weather, news, and a fun little module called compliments which regularly cycles compliments. There is a very large community around the Magic Mirror software and so has an extensive list of 3rd party modules that are often released as open source and so available to use. They are very easy to setup as well as remove and modify. It is as modular as they claim it to be. Modules are built in Javascript that generates HTML and CSS. If you can’t find something that lines up with what you want to do, there is plenty of documentation available to help you build your own. The committee may wind up doing this as we can’t seem to find a module that easily matches the voice control we want to have for the mirror. We fully intend to release our module as open source and are currently documenting our progress. Hopefully there will be another blog post on our adventures in module making!