How to make a DIY Smart Mirror

hey I'm Jamie and I'm Jay and today we're going to build a smart mirror so smart mirror is basically a two-way mirror that allows you to see not only yourself but whatever's happening on a screen behind the mirror they're really cool some people use it to show the weather what time it is little motivational messages of the day you can use it for all sorts of stuff you are amazing I mean who did I need that when I wake up who doesn't need a mirror to tell them they look beautiful in the morning the best thing about the mirrors is that you can customize them to display anything you can have them do all sorts of crazy cool stuff you can even like watch videos or play music on them things like that our goal here is to show you that building a smart mirror is way easier than you thought it could be we're going to show you how to use all different parts from Amazon and then we're going to take you step by step on how to assemble and program it so the gist of the design is that we're using a picture frame and then we're going to extend the back of it to make some room for the computer and stuff in the back and then we're going to put a two-way mirror in the frame in place of the normal glass and in the back we're going to put a computer monitor and then we're going to put a Raspberry Pi in the back of that to control it not only we're going to show you what parts to use and how to program it but we're going to show you how to securely put everything into the back so that it's nice and clean and safe the picture frame is just a simple black frame made out of like a composite wood and it has a really nice kind of like black textured finish which we thought had a really cool kind of modern look to it but there's not quite enough space behind the mirror to fit all of the components we need so the first step in our project is we're going to do a little bit of simple woodworking we're going to do this with three quarter inch plywood and you can use a table saw a bandsaw handsaw to cut it and if you don't have a saw usually the nice people at one of the big box stores like Home Depot will cut it for you so the easiest way to assemble a frame like this is with pocket screws now if you're new to woodworking or just new to pocket screws check out the link in the description below for the jig we're using if you're not familiar with pocket screws and you're kind of getting into woodworking they're an awesome way to put basic frames like this stuff together even some furniture can use pocket screws they're hidden underneath you can't see them and they're really easy to use so we need to paint the wood black to match the frame now we have a few different things on hand so you tried staying stains spray paint and we tried black acrylic and the one that ended up working the best was the black acrylic so we laid everything out and painted all the things and then let it dry so Pretend This is the picture frame and this is our little frame thing we just made it's going to go on like that on the back now the way that this attaches to that is pretty important because eventually it's going to hang off the wall like this and if this isn't strong your whole thing is going to come crashing down so it's pretty important that this is so to make it super strong we're going to screw these together and we're going to use pocket holes kind of going down this way to do that [Music] once everything's dry assembling the frame is pretty easy you can lay out all your pieces we like to use some blue painters tape and kind of tape the corners together to help keep them in place and then from there you put the screws in and screw it all together the links in the description have some special wood screws that are self-tapping so they're going to go into the wood really easily and help things stay aligned [Music] so once the frame is assembled we attach it to the back of the picture frame to do this we take a thick bead of super glue put it around the frame the wood frame that we built and then attach it to the back of the picture frame now we have to work really quick here because the super glue dries pretty fast but it creates a really strong hold once it's on in addition to that we are going to put some screws like we showed you there's two screws in each side and we just kind of make sure that things are nice and aligned first this is a great time to use some clamps if you have them and then you can just screw those screws down so this is the first smart mirror that Jamie and I ever made it's got a really cool custom Walnut frame that we made got a nice big two-way mirror for the smart part of it now these two-way mirrors also called one-way Mirrors by the way not confusing at all our super expensive if you need a big high quality piece of glass this is actually just acrylic it's plastic and it still works pretty well it's got a little bit of a wavy kind of like fun house kind of effect going on sometimes but if you can deal with that it's a really cool way to make one of these on a budget now this on the other hand is a super nice really high quality two-way mirror it's a quarter inch thick it's really high quality and we're going to get a lot of light passing through the back while maintaining a crystal clear reflection on the front they are expensive if you're on a budget the acrylic is a great option but if you're looking for the best quality mirror you can make you're definitely going to want to use a piece of glass like this when you first get the frame it's going to have a piece of plastic like faux glass type of stuff in the front and then it's going to have this 1 8 inch thick sort of cardboardy stuff on the back side both of those need to come out but make sure to keep the cardboard and don't let it get wrecked because we're going to use that later the pieces are held in by these little metal tabs that can bend up and down on the frame so you're going to bend all of those pieces up to get the pieces out and then go around the whole thing and make sure that every single tab is bent all the way up as far as it'll go once those tabs are out of the way we super carefully and gently take the mirror and we're going to lay it down in the frame the mirror is perfectly sized for the frame so it's going to fit really nicely but obviously you got to be super careful when you do this now the two-way mirror has two distinct sides there's one sort of bright side that looks kind of like a normal mirror and then another side that's obviously a lot darker you want that darker side to be facing the back once it's in place we're going to fold down all those little metal tabs super carefully and nice and tight on the mirror it's super important that all of the tabs get nice and tight against the mirror because this is what's going to hold it in place [Music] so the back of the Mirror Has a display that shows you smart things now there's a lot of things you can use for this but we chose a computer monitor now this particular monitor is really nice because it's easy to take apart and all of the little connection components are in a super convenient place before you do anything else plug in this monitor to either the Raspberry Pi or just a computer you have around and make sure it works the other thing you can do once you turn it on is crank the brightness all the way up to maximum after that we get to take it apart first thing we do is we lay it down gently on its side and you'll notice we put a towel down so that nothing gets scratched up we're going to take off the bottom stand part first that comes off really easily then you're going to lay it face down and there's a couple of screws right near all of the plugs in the back and those are going to come out but make sure you don't lose them because we're going to use those for something late from there a small flathead screwdriver is perfect to kind of Pop all the little plastic tabs and get the back piece all the way off that's going to expose a bunch of screws that kind of go along the edge you can take all of those out and then you can carefully take the front bezel off of the monitor there's also a little panel of buttons along the bottom and that's going to pop off of that front piece too do that gently if you do happen to accidentally pull the wires out don't panic they go back in don't ask me how I know that so remember that cardboard backer we told you not to throw away now we get to use it so we take all of the little metal pieces off lay it down and then we Center the monitor perfectly on the cardboard and then we take a pencil and draw our outline around the monitor next you're going to take a really sharp utility knife and carefully cut out that middle rectangle part don't cut yourself don't cut the towel underneath it move the towel and then carefully cut it all out and the closer you get the better because the monitor is then going to fit really nicely into that spot and if there's no gaps around the outside you're not going to get any extra light bleeding through now before anything else goes in this is your last chance to clean the back side of the mirror if you got all kinds of fingerprints and stuff on it and then you're going to take that piece of cardboard or is it cardboard yeah wood whatever the stuff put it in the mirror carefully and then you're going to take the Monitor and carefully put that right in the middle up against the glass once you get the monitor in you're going to take a hot glue gun and we're going to trace all the way around the edges of the monitor to secure it in place also while the hot glue gun is hot still we're going to use it to hot glue the little button tab to the back of the monitor in kind of a convenient place so that we can get to those buttons now to actually secure the board and the monitor into place we're going to use those other two pieces of wood that we cut earlier they need to fit inside the frame perfectly so hold them up against the back of your frame and mark off exactly where the Inside Edge is and then cut them to fit we're going to put a couple more of those pocket holes into each end of each of those pieces now we didn't do that before because we need to cut them to the final length before we do that the first one is going to go on the bottom of the monitor right up against the edge and that's going to kind of hold it from the bottom and then the second one is going to go about three quarters of the way up kind of press tightly against the back of the Monitor and that's going to hold it up against the glass with these two pieces in place this thing is super solid it's not going anywhere now if you followed the link in the description we recommend buying the full kit with the Raspberry Pi because it comes with all the stuff you're going to need the memory card gets carefully installed into the bottom this little slot here and then to put it into the case you install it like so and then snap the rest of the pieces of the case together next we'll plug everything in and then hit the little power switch that it comes with and turn it on we realized after the fact that this whole part we're about to do would have been way smarter to do before we like took apart the whole monitor and installed it into the mirror so if you're going to build one of these on your own I actually recommend doing this part first before you do the monitor stuff you'll see this screen pop up which is going to be an installation for the operating system there's a button on the top left that says install so you're going to click that and then wait about 15 minutes for the whole thing to install when it's done the whole thing is going to restart and you're going to see an interface that looks a lot like a Windows or a Mac computer it's going to pop up a couple of screens it's going to ask you things like what time zone are you in and it's going to ask ask you for your Wi-Fi that's really important because we do need our Raspberry Pi to connect to the internet we're going to use an open source app called magic mirror which is a program that was built exactly for this on the top left click the icon to open the web browser then in the search bar type magic mirror and the link right at the top is the one you want now we highly recommend you spend some time when you have it and read a bunch of the documentation figure out kind of what this thing's all about how it works all the different modules you can use to customize it and do all sorts of really neat stuff but for now we just want the basics on how to install scroll down the page a little bit till you see this and click on the link to read the documentation on the left hand side there's a link that says installation and usage click that and that's going to bring up some documentation on how to install the magic mirror software now if you're not familiar with programming and stuff like that then looking at this is probably super intimidating but trust us you can definitely do this like shown open the terminal app and normally this is where you would type in all this stuff but instead of doing that we're actually going to copy it from the instructions paste it into the terminal and then just hit enter to run it we're going to run one line at a time and after we do each one we're going to wait till it's finished and then move on to the next step there's about five or six steps here some of them take a little while but carefully go one at a time and just copy that message paste it into the terminal hit enter and after a few minutes you're going to be up and running when you get to the final step it's cool because it's actually going to run the app for the first time just turning it on is only the beginning there are literally hundreds of custom modules you can put in there there's all sorts of like weather and news and entertainment you can watch videos you could do like crazy Alexa and Google Assistant stuff there's a million things you can do to customize it this is just the beginning so now that the Raspberry Pi is working it's time to finally put it all together the first little piece we put in is this 90 degree angle for the HDMI adapter now we need this because otherwise it would stick out too far then we plugged in the power cable for the Monitor and just kind of Tuck that away a little bit then we're going to take the Raspberry Pi back out of the case and then take the bottom of the case and you'll notice it has two little holes for mounting do you remember those two little screws that we kept from when we took the monitor apart well they're going to come in handy right now because we're going to use them to attach the pie to the back of the monitor so it stays in place the most convenient place to put it is right here but there's a little knob kind of in the way on the back of the monitor so what we did is we just took a little file and just kind of like cut away a part of the plastic case it literally took like 10 seconds and then it fit perfectly and we used that little screw and screwed it to the back of the monitor so once that was in place we put everything back together plugged in our cable to secure all of our cable s Crow tie things they're really really useful for this kind of stuff but you could also just use like some tape or some string or something the other thing that helps a lot when you're doing cable routing like this is hot glue we used a little bit of hot glue to secure the big power adapter for the monitor in place and then in a couple other places to hold the cables down after that we plugged it into our power outlet and turned it on [Music] foreign hey y'all thanks for sticking with us and thanks for watching the video we really hope you liked it and I hope it inspires you to make your own smart mirror as always if you think we deserve it please give us a thumbs up and consider subscribing to the channel helps us out a lot leave us a comment let us know what you think until next time stay Wicked we need to move it today so smart weird you said you were ready

Channel: Wicked Random

Views: 320,551

Keywords: how to make a DIY smart mirror, wicked makers, smart mirror, diy smart mirror, smart mirror raspberry pi, smart mirror diy, how to make a smart mirror, how to build a smart mirror, building a smart mirror, jay and jaimie, diy smart mirror raspberry pi, diy smart mirror easy, raspberry pi smart mirror, raspberry pi diy smart mirror, magic mirror, diy magic mirror, how to make a magic mirror, smart mirror tutorial, smart mirror build, raspberry pi, magic mirror raspberry pi

Id: xmmBWdNWvY4

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2023