The trickiest step here turns out to be the display itself. Grensom connects the board to a wall-mounted television through the micro HDMI port, and the Raspbian desktop first shows up with unwanted black edges around the picture. The fix is a single checkbox in the welcome dialog that corrects the screen margins, and once that is ticked the interface fills the panel properly. It is a small detail, but on a display meant to sit behind glass it matters a lot.
The hardware side is kept simple: a Pi 4 Model B in a black two-piece official case, a 16 GB microSD card flashed with the full Raspbian Buster image using balenaEtcher and a dual-slot card reader on a PC, a yellow USB-C power cable fed from a wall plug on a power strip, plus a mouse and wireless keyboard for setup. The micro HDMI lead goes to the HDMI0 port.
For the software, MagicMirror is installed with a bash curl command pulled from magicmirror.builders, found through the Chromium browser. PM2 handles auto-startup, the screensaver is disabled during installation, and keyboard shortcuts adjust the interface scaling for different monitors. The finished result is genuinely appealing: widgets for time, date, a four-day forecast, calendar events, a greeting and Spotify floating over reflective glass. Grensom points out that it beats opening four or five separate apps, especially while getting ready.
One thing is left open: this tutorial covers only the software setup, and which mirror glass was used or where it came from is handled in a separate build instead. That feels like a fair split, though anyone hoping to copy the whole project will need both parts.
Project by Grensom. Watch it on their YouTube channel: