This year I took an honors seminar class called Science & Creativity taught by Professor Dieter Vanderelst. Due to the impact of COVID-19 on the traditional college experience, this class was taught in a hybrid fashion with some classes in-person and some classes online. This course covered various topics ranging from 3D-design/printing to coding in python to learning about the raspberry pi. Much of this class revolved around learning skills that would help us develop and create a final project that encompassed some of the skills we were taught. This final project could be something physical to create or code that accomplishes a certain task. I decided to mix a little of both worlds and create a magic mirror. A magic mirror is essentially a monitor located behind a double-sided mirror, hence creating a smart device that displays information along with your reflection. To develop a magic mirror, I decided to implement a raspberry pi computer to handle the display information and connect to the internet in order to provide the time and weather of wherever the mirror is located. Before I could build the housing for the mirror apparatus, I needed to tackle the code aspect of the project. I configured the Raspberry pi Zero W for the magic mirror which is what we used in class. To start, I needed to set up a local webserver that the raspberry pi could access and display as the display of the magic mirror. There were a lot of setbacks I experienced while trying to set up a local webserver. On multiple occasions I had to download extra software packages and many times I had messed up certain packages while attempting to configure them.

             Eventually, I was able to set up the local webserver, however, I wanted the raspberry pi to automatically boot up the webserver from start up. I configured the system settings to open the webserver from bootup in full-screen mode, however, somewhere through my efforts I had disturbed the local webserver, so now when it loads the webserver, it says it cannot connect to it. Although this is not as far as I had hoped to reach by the end of the class, I am satisfied with the achievements I have made and appreciative of everything I have learned from class. Below I have attached a video portraying the local webserver opening upon bootup of the raspberry pi. I hope to work more on this project this coming year and hopefully end up with a complete and functional raspberry pi. Check in on this page in the future for more updates!