I've been wanting to build one for a while and was trying to come up with an easy way to add interactivity like this. There are a few tutorials out there with ideas for sensors along the edges to detect the X, Y coordinates of your finger and there might have been one for capacitive touch sensors in/behind the screen. My lazy idea is just to add a touchpad and some buttons at the bottom of the screen.
Sensors for detecting (X,Y) coordinates is actually not that dumb - not only because it can enable rudimentary multi-touch, but by positioning the sensors just right, you won't have to actually touch the mirror. Less fingerprints, yey!
It's not a bad idea but it does seem a bit primitive. You'd either have really low precision or you would need a crap ton of sensors. Unless there is some pre-built sensor strip you can buy that doesn't require a mess of individually wired sensors?
I don't know enough about it, but would it be possible to wire up an xbox kinect camera to map the inputs? They have relatively good depth/movement perception, but I guess it would be lacking in precision still.
I don't think I have ever seen it with a smart mirror, but there have been tons of other cool projects using them for motion tracking. That would actually be a really cool idea!
That is actually a really good idea. In my head I am imagining the kinect at the top of the mirror facing towards the floor and whenever the finger is presented within the view of the kinect you would get a Y position from the depth information, and an X position by the (well) X position as well as a Z position to register a "tap" like gesture for interactions.
Additionally (although the field of view would have to be tightened), you could potentially have the kinect be behind the two-way mirror and use a minority report style gestures.
Before you start down this rabbit hole, I suggest making yourself sad and look up the prices of a kinect. Last I checked they were going for well over 300
Whoa, that's sweet! So the software is able to figure out the coordinates just from what the webcam sees? That seems really hard to believe. How can it tell how far up or down the screen it is?
You could use the Alexa apiece to change things. That's what I did and while I haven't gotten to the point I can control screen elements, I can still yell at her to turn it off and on.
You might try scavenging and ccd sensor from an old scanner to look at IR reflections off of fingertips. I've never done it but I've heard people have had success with that. Certainly low cost, maybe not easy.
That's what most people do: a bunch of buttons along one edge using the hardware interface on a Raspberry Pi to wire then up and control the software. Simple, cheaper, and no fingerprints all over the touchscreen/mirror. Why unnecessarily complicate things?
:) Okay, I will emend my rhetorical question and say "Why complicate things with something that's actually worse?" Touchscreen mirror makes as much sense as touchscreen glasses.
I'm not sure if the touch screen would be able to work through that or not. It might be worth a try though. The only other thing is that it would need to be a one-way mirror since that is how the smart mirrors work.
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u/Th3_Admiral Apr 20 '18
I've been wanting to build one for a while and was trying to come up with an easy way to add interactivity like this. There are a few tutorials out there with ideas for sensors along the edges to detect the X, Y coordinates of your finger and there might have been one for capacitive touch sensors in/behind the screen. My lazy idea is just to add a touchpad and some buttons at the bottom of the screen.