Smart Mirror

A couple weeks ago a friend asked if I was interested in joining his team for a hackathon at his company. I have always wanted to compete in a hackathon, but never got around to it. We had a multitude of ideas for what to build but ultimately decided on a smart mirror. A smart mirror is a fairly new DIY thing were people utilize a two-way mirror to display some sort of text to the user. A popular way to do this is with a raspberry pi, which we decided to go with. We used a raspberry pi 3 with a pi camera, a push button, a 10-inch LCD screen and a two way mirror for the project.

For software we wanted the mirror to be in a popular language that is easy to add new features to. After some research we determined there aren't too many options for open source smart mirrors other than Magic Mirror. Magic Mirror is a great project but utilizes software called nodejs which can be difficult to learn in a quick manner. We ultimately decided on using Java for API calls and to display the text. To control the GPIO pins and the PI camera I used a python script. The python code read the digital status of a GPIO pin that was connected to a push button on a breadboard. If the code determined the button was activated it would take a picture with the PiCamera, save the photo then send the photo as an attachment to a predetermined email address. I haven't done too much work with python prior to this project but I learned how powerful and easy the language is.

The hackathon competition was Monday July 11th. I took the subway over to his office and we presented it to three judges in the morning. We didn't have much time to explain the project but they really enjoyed it and were enthusiastic about our work! We ended up making it to the finals and I went back on my lunch break for the final presentation. It was in a big room packed with many employees and three judges, one of whom was the CEO of the company, sitting in the front of the room. We were up first and the presentation went very well! We ended up getting the most innovative award and I got my first job offer! Overall was an amazing weekend.