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Smart Mirror

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For my Intro to Engineering Design class we were tasked to design and fabricate a project of our choosing. After brainstorming a couple of ideas, my team and I settled on making a smart mirror. This mirror relays information such as weather, time, news, and the MBTA schedule. A snapshot of the mirror's user can also be taken and downloaded from a local website. The Accelerate's Smart Mirror serves as a decoration piece that demonstrates the maker culture that Accelerate's curates to.

Teammates: 
Marlon Michel & Nile Keiller

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A Closer Look at the Smart Mirror

The Smart Mirror was designed for use at the Accelerate Makerspace at Wentworth Institute of Technology. The makerspace is used by many makers who create wearable projects such as costumes and smart function clothing. The smart mirror provides these makers to observe the look of their wearable projects in real-time, a feature that was previously absent in the makerspace. In addition, the maker can have their reflection captured from a camera attached to the smart mirror. This allows the maker access to an easy-to-use method of photographing the progress of their projects being worn. By using the Magic Mirror package the mirror can host a collection of various utility modules to relay pertinent information to the mirror's observer. This includes modules such as weather, an RSS news feed of campus news, Wentworth's Twitter feed, time, and MBTA schedules. Accelerate's Smart Mirror is open source and contains documentation for Wentworth students to develop their own modules and hardware add-ons, thus the smart mirror serves as an educational tool for students to learn engineering through projects. 

Magic Mirror Reference: 
https://magicmirror.builders/​

Design and Hardware

The mirror was designed to be supporting a two-way acrylic mirror that used a 40" television as a monitor. Acrylic was chosen to be the mirror's material over glass. Acrylic is prone to minor warping, it has greater structural reliance than glass along with resistance to scratches and abrasions. For simplicity, the frame of the mirror is constructed with 2"x3" whitewood lumber. Rubber grips are attached to the bottom of the frame to prevent sliding ad provide greater stability for the mirror. The mirror and stand are designed to provide a viewable full-body reflection. The software of the mirror is run off a raspberry pi. It is connected to a webcam that is mounted to the top of the mirror and is positioned to capture images that match the reflection of the mirror. A control panel made using simple push buttons connected to the GPIO pins of the raspberry pi controls the photography function of the mirror and provides various countdown timings to delay when the photographs are taken. Images are stored in an Apache web server that can be accessed and downloaded by entering a URL as long as the user is connected to the local network. 

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Materials:​

  • Raspberry Pi computer​

  • 40” Television​

  • Wooden Frame​

  • Wooden Mirror Stand​

  • Photography control panel

  • Acrylic two-way mirror

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