The Brain of my Smart Home: A Home Assistant based Magic Mirror including Face Recognition and Touch Screen

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Hi,

Just finished my 40 inch Magic Mirror based on Home Assistant Frontend to control all devices like lights and vacuum with touchscreen. Also displaying information like weather, newly downloaded or ready to view shows and movies, news and calendar. In addition in supports face recognition to show personalized data from the person standing in front of the mirror and hide personal data from “unknown” viewers.

It supports multiple dashboards. It addition to the main dashboard I also have a dedicated dashboard for energy data, shows and movies and an almost empty one for mirror view.

I also included a Chromecast so I have a platform to view my holiday after movies right from the mirror.

It uses a raspberry pi 4B with pi camera to power the magic mirror. An old 40 inch Samsung TV functions as the screen which is al put away nicely behind a two way mirror. In front of the glass there is an infrared frame delivering the touchscreen functionality. The LED is a nice touch combined with power on/off and face recognition: It lights up when the screen is turned on over CEC and fades out when it turns off (base don whether somebody is in the room or not, to safe power). Upon face recognitions the LED shortly turns green or red when no face is recognized. Furthermore it obviously supports Zigbee and communicates over Wifi. Therefore the only wire leaving the mirror is the power cord which in this case I was able to hide behind the mirror.

Home assistant is installed in a docker container on the raspberry pi. Kiosk view shows the Home Assistant dashboard and OpenCV is used for Face Recognition. A lot of custom made components like Lovelace cards and Integrations build by the Home Assistant community are used to deliver this need view.

This device functions literally as the brain of my Smart Home. And now I can easily interact with it.

Below I included to pictures. For the full demo see: Smart Mirror Demo - YouTube

What do you all think?

Many thanks for all people who contributed to building this mirror interface. I heavily leaned on this community to get it to work and used many custom components developed by amazing people who shared it freely!

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18 Likes
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Bloody brilliant. Well done.

In the one shot, it looks like it’s not a mirror (the background looks dark and non-reflective: Can you control whether it’s reflective or not?

And how do you keep it smudge free, or doesn’t it matter? Perhaps an oleophobic coating of sorts? Just asking, because I’m the kind of person that will go nuts if someone points out something on my computer screen and actually touches it. :wink:

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Thanks man!

I think it appears that way in the photograph because I turn the surrounding lights off, so there isn’t much light to reflect. I’m not able to change te reflectiveness in any way. Just used a two way mirror glass.

Smudges are actually barely visible. I was surprised too. I think it’s due to the dark background combined with light from the TV shining thru. The mirror has been up for a while now and I haven’t clean in since, not even before making these pictures/video. So for now I’m just gonna leave it like this!

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Love the hard work and the video! Do you mind sharing the hardware? I’m having a hard time deciding on the two way mirror, and the touch screen is a very nice addition (how did you do that?)

Thanks in advance!

1 Like
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Hi Casey,

Thanks! I used a raspberry pi 4, with a pi Noir Camera and a glass two way mirror. For the touchscreen I used a IR touch panel (you can find them at amazon or AliExpress. Thats it. Takes some time to get it all working but no other hardware needed. The pi 4 can handle it (including face reg) but the pi 5 is probably the better choice now :smiley:

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Hi Zoe,

The final result looks really cool. Could you help me which apps you added? Is there a list available and also could you direct me to where can i learn how to install these apps on the rasperry pi to have this full dashboard?

Thank you in advance

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Also is it possible to manage Home Assistant from Magic Mirror or it can only display info no action can be triggered (turning lights off, starting vacuum cleaner, etc)?