SMART MIRROR

Abstract

Smart Mirror project has been developed within the context of a time where every day we see more and more connected devices. The Internet transformed our lives by connecting us more easily to information and other people in the virtual world. Mobile phones became Smart phones and since then this concept has erupted and morphed into the Internet of Things, things which connect us to everyday objects. There is no end of objects that could be made smarter, some being more suited to this than others. Mirrors for example, provide a large surface ideal for displaying information to interacting with. Most people have mirrors at home. So the concept of a smart mirror that we can interact with is attractive and has been fantasized in many futuristic movies. Smart mirrors have recently started to be developed by people in the Maker community, with varying degrees of interactivity. However, so far, the features of these mirrors have been limited. This final year project describes how a smart mirror was built from scratch using a Raspberry Pi 3 microprocessor for the hardware and custom software built on top of Raspbian, a Linux distribution. The goal of the project is to create a low cost Smart Mirror device that people could interact with but also to further develop the technology so that it would let you install and develop your own applications for it. Our Smart Mirror is developed in six months, starting with the software and finally integrating it with the hardware. A few problems arose in the physical construction and software side of the project, such as the glass not being reflective enough but these drawbacks can be addressed by doing more tests and trials to further develop the Smart Mirror.