flirror 0.0.9

A smartmirror based on Flask

Flirror - A smartmirror based on Flask

Deploy flirror on a Raspberry Pi

Requirements

• Docker
• docker-compose

Install docker

To install docker on raspbian OS, you can simply run the following command:

$ curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh

This will download the installation script and directly execute it via shell. Running the script may take some time. Afterwards, you might want to add your user (pi) to the docker group, so you can run docker without sudo:

$ sudo usermod -aG docker pi

Afterwards log out and back or reboot the Raspberry Pi via

$ sudo reboot -h

Install docker-compose

There are various ways to install docker-compose. Please see the docker-compose installation guide for more detailed information.

I personally installed docker-compose via pipx. Using this variant requires the python-dev and libffi-dev packages to be installed on the system.

$ sudo apt install python-dev libffi-dev
$ python3 -m pip install --user pipx
$ python3 -m pipx ensurepath
$ pipx install docker-compose

Start flirror

Both components, flirror-web and flirror-crawler can be started via the docker-compose.yaml file within this repository. Thus, you can simply start both services by running.

$ docker-compose up web crawler

within the root of this repository.

With both services running we still need to open some kind of browser to see the actual flirror UI. This can be done by executing the helpers/start_gui.sh script. Apart from starting chromium in full screen mode targeting the running flirror-web instance inside the docker container, the script also ensures that some environment variables like DISPLAY are set and deactivates screen saver and energy saving mode of the X server - so the display doesn't go into sleep mode after a few minutes.

Optional configuration

To hide the mouse cursor, install unclutter via

sudo apt install unclutter

and add the following line to /home/pi/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart

@unclutter -display :0 -noevents -grab