Configuring the Raspberry Pi

Configuring the Raspberry Pi

Rotating the screen and hide Rainbow colored cube

edit/boot/config.txt: sudo nano /boot/config.txt

Add the following line:

display_rotate=1
avoid_warnings=1

#display_rotate=0 Normal
#display_rotate=1 90 degrees
#display_rotate=2 180 degrees
#NOTE: You can rotate both the image and touch interface 180º by entering lcd_rotate=2 instead`
#display_rotate=3 270 degrees

Then reboot the pi: sudo reboot

Auto Starting MagicMirror

PM2 is a production process manager for Node.js applications with a built-in load balancer. It allows you to keep applications alive forever, to reload them without downtime and to facilitate common system admin tasks. In this case we will use it to keep a shell script running.

Install PM2 using NPM:

sudo npm install -g pm2

To make sure PM2 can do it's job when (re)booting your operating system, it needs to be started on boot. Luckily, PM2 has a handy helper for this.

pm2 startup

PM2 will now show you a command you need to execute.

Make a MagicMirror start script.

To use PM2 in combination with MagicMirror, we need to make a simple shell script. Preferable, we put this script outside the MagicMirror folder to make sure it won't give us any issues if we want to upgrade the mirror.

cd ~
nano mm.sh

Add the following lines:

cd ~/MagicMirror
DISPLAY=:0 npm start

Save and close, using the commands CTRL-O and CTRL-X. Now make sure the shell script is executable bij performing the following command:chmod +x mm.sh You are now ready to the MagicMirror using this script using PM2.

Starting your MagicMirror with PM2

Simply start your mirror with the following command: pm2 start mm.sh You mirror should now boot up and appear on your screen after a few seconds.

Enable restarting of the MagicMirror script.

To make sure the MagicMirror restarts after rebooting, you need to save the current state of all scripts running via PM2. To do this, execute the following command pm2 saveAnd that's all there is! You MagicMirror should now reboot after start, and restart after any failure.

Controlling you MagicMirror via PM2.

With your MagicMirror running via PM2, you have some handy tools at hand: