Poor man's smart mirror

By covering a computer display with a mirror foil or a two way mirror you can make a smart mirror - a mirror where you can both look at yourself and get an update from the attached computer. This is typically used to give updates on weather, news, calendar and so on. I have wanted to have one for some time, but the obvious location in the main bathroom has a mirror that is glued to the wall.

Since I am not about to remodel the bathroom or move to a new one, I thought I should look into other ways of achieving a similar effect, while leaving the mirror unharmed. My solution was to combine a unused 4:3 Dell display and a Raspberry Pi single-board computer, and place this so that I could see the computer display's mirror image when I stood in front of the regular mirror.


The application I tried was Michael Teeuw's Magic Mirror. It turned out that my myopia meant that I needed big letters to be able to read easily via the mirror, so some playing around with the configuration was needed. And of course I needed to force the computer to render a mirrored image on the display. The Raspberry Pi can do that, although not as easily as one could hope!

The result is shown in the image on the right. Due partly to WAF the installation did not become permanent. But I am intrigued by the prospect of adding some software for facial recognition and make the display switch dynamically between the mirrored and the normal display, depending on which way the viewer is looking. But since the Rapberry Pi needs a reboot to switch display configuration, I will need computer that implements the RandR protocol to do this.

Actually, there are a number of features that can be designed around such a platform, and an important angle is so called welfare technology - technology that is aimed at helping for example elderly stay at home instead of being taken into care. When I get older I expect that such solutions can help me take my medication, monitor my physical fitness, remind me about appointments and so on.   
  

Øystein's Twine

My house is partially heated by circulating water in the floors, and this hot water is generated by a heat pump. This pump, the hot water tank and the rest of the distribution system is meant to require minimal attention. But when I found myself looking for a target for my Twine, I found that monitoring the heat pump allowed me to maximize my use of its sensors.

Embedded in the Twine there are sensors for temperature, vibration and the device's own orientation. To this I added a moisture sensor, so that I can monitor:

• the temperature of the water pump
• the vibration of the water pump
• any water released to control the pressure in the system

Before activating the Twine I had to rely on observing the heat pump to get its status. As I frequently have business in the basement this was no big problem, but I had to be at home. With the addition of the Twine I can now get the status over the Internet, whether I was elsewhere in the house or somewhere with Internet access.

Access to the Twine goes via the services of Supermechanical, so I depend on they staying in business for the setup to work.

By the way, the use of solutions like Twine is included in the concept of Welfare technology, applied to finding ways to reduce the burden of the elderly boom that is expected in the future.