I have a wall-mounted television in my office that, 99% of the time, sits idle. Sadly, the fully loaded RetroPie attached to it doesn’t get much Super Mario Bros action during the workday. But that idle Raspberry Pi had me thinking of ways to utilize that extra screen in my office. Since, well, 4 monitors is not enough.
Magic Mirror
At first, I contemplated writing my own application in .Net 5. But I really do not have the kind of time it would take to get something like that moving, and it seems counter-productive. I wanted something quick and easy, with no necessary input interface (it is a television, after all), and capable of displaying feed data quickly. That is when I stumbled on Magic Mirror 2.
Magic Mirror is a Node-based app which uses Electron to display HTML on various platforms, including on the Raspberry Pi. It is popular, well-documented, and modular. It has default modules for weather and clock, as well as a third-party module for package tracking.
Server Status… Yes please.
There are several modules around displaying status, but nothing I saw that let me display the status from my statuspage.io page. And since statuspage.io has a public API, unique to each page, that doesn’t require an API key, it felt like a good first module to develop for myself.
I spent a lot of time understanding the module aspect of MagicMirror, but, in the end, I have a pretty simplistic module that’ll display my statuspage.io status on the magic mirror.
What is next?
Well, there are two things I would really like to try:
- Work on integrating a floor plan of my house, complete with status from my home automation.
- Re-work MagicMirror as a React app.
For the first one, well, there are some existing third-party components that I will test. That second one, well, that seems a slightly taller task. That might have to be a winter project.
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