DIY Magic Mirror and Photobooth - Arduino Powered

Step 6 The Magic Mirror PC

For the PC, an el cheapo PC or laptop will do (a Netbook works great and is nice and compact). It can't be too old though as it does need to run the video smoothly. If your PC can play these videos files, then you'll be ok. These are the same video files that come with the software installation so are quite large and will be normally running from your local hard drive so expect some network delay when you click the link.

I went the custom route and re-purposed an old vacuum tube tester case. I went with an Intel ATOM motherboard since its low power and very compact (mini-ITX form factor). One annoying thing on this model was the excessively loud fan which would ruin the effect. I found a silent fan at Fry's for $20, you can still hear it but barely. I re-purposed some of the controls, the on/off switch and a pot which is used to select the mirror mode on the fly (princess, halloween, or pirate). Also added some fiber optics for show. For the sound, I run the normal soundcard output into a whole house audio distribution system and play through the in-ceiling speakers which is nice so you don't see the PC speakers.

Another nice feature and benefit of using Flash with an Internet connection is you can play different videos based on data received from the Internet. For mine, I did different things for the weather and stock portfolio. For the weather, I call a Yahoo Weather API and then play a different video based on the forecast, one video for good weather, one for ok weather, and another for rain. For the stock, a different video plays based on how your stock portfolio performed with the stocks being specified in the config file. Same concept, one video for good performance, one for no or little change, and one for down. The threshold limits on what defines up and down can be changed in the configuration program.

For remote maintenance, VNC is setup so you can connect remotely from another PC using a ultraVNC. VNC comes with UBUNTU so if you go the LINUX route, its already there. Its very easy to install though on Windows, although I don't know if VNC works with Windows Vista or Windows 7.

Comments

[manchaware]

Have you heard of the beagleboard? It's an ultra small (3"x3") pc board capable of playing HD video (via DVI-D/HDMI). It comes with 1 USB, 1 Line in, 1 Line Out, and 1 S-Video Out. And, it only requires 5V @ 500mA so you don't need a fan to cool it. It doesn't have a HDD, but instead sports an SD slot so you can probably run Debian or Ubuntu off a 1gb SD card.

[novelgazer]

Mindbogglingly cool project! How did you get the digital puppet running under linux? Emulation? Or did you create the videos on another OS and play them on the Ubuntu box?

[alinke]

thanks, I did video captures of the digital puppets using WinXP syncing the mouth movements with the voice overs. The videos were put together in Adobe Premiere and then converted to Adobe Flash format. Ubuntu plays the videos via the stand alone Flash player for LINUX. Since Flash is also talking to the Arduino and sensors, the videos can be changed dynamically based on what sensor went off.

[bethehammer]

What software did you use to capture the digital puppets? I have tried recording the puppets but cant seem to get that to work...

[novelgazer]

That's a much more sensible plan than I was thinking. I suppose the flash could also play live video from a little webcam, maybe hidden in the frame, to make it slightly more mirror-like when the face isn't present. The angle would be off, but it could be a neat effect. Again -- awesome project! Thanks for sharing it.

[alinke]

thanks again, I like the webcam idea, maybe I'll try that in version 2.0 :-)