5/22/2025 Day 1: Research

Hello! This was Day 1 of MiRPi's development, and it was just research, research, research. I decided that I would use an IR Touch Frame (Touchscreen Panel) on top of a 30% transparent mirror panel on top of a monitor for the entire smart mirror system to work. Day 2 will be more technically focused, deciding on how I would design the system as a whole.

I also setup this GitHub repo to store this journal, all my source files, and eventually the BOM for MiRPi!

Total time spent: 1.5h

5/23/2025 Day 2: Further Planning

Today, I decided that the mirror itself wasn't complex enough for Highway, so I did some thinking and came up with an idea. I was planning on putting LED strip lights behind the mirror to give it that floating effect, and I thought it would be cool if a custom PCB with a photoresistor could change the brightness and color of the lights (through emitting IR/RF) based on the amount of light in a room.

I also started to see if the parts I wanted to use were available online, and I was able to find relatively cheaper versions using Alibaba instead of Amazon.

Total time spent: 2h

6/27/2025 Day 3: Coming Back to MirPi

Well, after a month of going back and forth on this project, I decided to finally start working on it again. However, I'm wondering on whether I should use a Raspberry Pi or a custom PCB. Maybe a PCB with a RPI Zero on it.

Today I started to rethink how the project would be built out. The IR Touch Frame takes a while to ship, so I would probably drop that and just use voice commands. Integration with ChatGPT or other LLMs would be interesting to add.

Total time spent: 1h