Smart Mirror: Starting Up

With no keyboard or pointer inputs, ensuring the Smart Mirror can be restarted and booted up entirely automatically was high on my priority list. Once installed, I can’t startx or click on any icons; it needs to bring up all the backend services and the dashboard to leave it in a working state without any user intervention. That lead me down a merry path and was (for me) the trickiest part of this project.

Here’s the moving parts:

  • The kernel and OS itself, with networking and other key systems
  • The display and window manager - the subsystems that allow me to put my dashboard up on the screen
  • The mosquitto message broker
  • The gpio listeners
  • The web server
  • The browser, which should load up my dashboard URL

I went through lots of helpful posts and projects on creating linux kiosks to figure out potential approaches. While the mirror isn’t really a kiosk - a kiosk usually has keyboard/pointer/touch user input - its a reasonable match up. After a few false starts trying Firefox/Iceweasel and Chromium kiosk options, I settled on the approach outlined in this Dashing-Pi page. This eschews the LXDE desktop environment entirely and uses nodm and the matchbox window manager to boot into the browser with the minumum of unecessary fluff inbetween.

Orchestrating startup is a bit fiddly even so. First, nodm is configured to startup with/as the ‘pi’ user. The rest of the graphics/display related startup is then in a script copied to /home/pi/.xsession, which starts up the matchbox display manager, and the Uzbl browser to load the dashboard. For the backend pieces, Raspian uses the init.d system, so we install scripts in /etc/init.d/ to start up mosquitto, pm2 (which manages the node.js server(s)) and scripts to relay GPIO events as MQTT messages for the rest of the system.

That done, I can plug the thing in and in just a minute or so it brings up the dashboard on screen and responds to sensor events. The Uzbl browser is a wrapper around WebKit. It supports commands via a socket, which means that once up, I can ssh to the rPi and remotely refresh the page, navigate to other URLs and so on which has proved valuable during development as I have none of the traditional inputs (e.g ctrl+r on the keyboard) to accomplish this otherwise.