I had a left over Pi 3 from a few years ago that I wanted to repurpose for a Smart Mirror side project. Why? So I could make an overly complicated and ultimately useless shared family calendar and display other pieces of information. But, it seemed fun and I also want to get back in my shop and build something.
This guy was originally a RetroPi loadout, or maybe a version of some emulation tool that was before RetroPi.
The initial install was pretty easy, reformatted the card and used the Raspberry Imager tool straight from the site. Installed the default OS. Put the card back in Pi and boot up. Connect to the Pi and get in and figure out some of these commands, no idea what they mean or do other than inferring by name.
It went through a few lines and said it was fine.. okay, next steps
Code:
npm install -g @senses-mirror/senses-cli
A WHOLE BUNCH of errors. Had to comb through that line by line and make sense of what it was trying to say. I saw a few lines related to node.js 12.2.2 || < 16.X.X or similar and guessed that meant whatever node.js is was not the right version. So started the hunt for how to do that. Found out there's something called node, nodejs, and npm (also from the previous command). The a whole lot of
Code:
sudo apt-get remove nodejs
sudo apt remove npm
sudo apt-get install nodejs
sudo apt-get install npm
node -v
nodejs -v
And etc and could never get it to grab anything other than a version 12. So back on the hunt for how to manually get version whatever the newest is. I have no idea what this crap is. Found another tutorial that seemed to point me in the right direction:
Code:
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_18.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt install -y nodejs
That pops up some big warning banner about how this whole thing is deprecated and I need to look at the node website to find the new way to do this. Good lord. Back to the drawing board.
I found on the Node.js site a link to node-v18.18.0.tar.gz and then found another tutorial showing me how to use a similar process as above to grab just that file, then unzip it (or whatever) and add it. Well that didn't work either. No idea why, can't remember at this point, still trying to make heads or tails out of all this.
Eventually I did get node installed and the correct version and was able to go back and get Sense installed.
Code:
npm install -g @senses-mirror/senses-cli
senses install
sense run
Yay! I've got the program running and can see the default layout screen. Awesome. Instructions say that I can't modify my layout on the default profile so to create a new one and switch to that one. Create a new profile, switch... nothing. Switch? Press it again, nothing. Restart Pi, start over. Go back to switch profile, nothing. Nothing I could do would switch the profile and there's almost no documentation or community out there. I was pretty much stuck. No clue how to troubleshoot that.
Time to start over and switch to Magic Mirror. Reformatting SD card now b/c somewhere in this process it was completely corrupted and Pi Imager could not write to it. Going through a reformat in Disk Management to see if that fixes it, otherwise I've got a broke SD card.
