When it comes to smart dashboard displays, there are a lot of different programs to choose from based on what you need. If you’re into overclocking, you might want a dashboard to display your computer metrics. If you’re a business owner, perhaps you have a Jira or Airtable dashboard. There are also a number of general-purpose dashboards that are made to help individuals organize their daily lives.

Among these all-purpose dashboards, DAKboard is probably the most popular right now, just because it’s beginner-friendly and requires very little technical knowledge. However, those advantages come at a price (literally, it costs money to use). It does have a free tier, but it’s very limited in its capabilities. At the other end of the spectrum is MagicMirror2, an open-source dashboard that anyone with a spare computer (or SBC) and display can use if they have an intermediate understanding of how to use a computer or a willingness to learn some new skills.

What is a Magic Mirror?

Magic Mirror is essentially a digital cork board where you can display the digital tools that are most important to you. To get an idea of the problems that the Magic Mirror can solve, take a look at some of the tools (called modules) that are preinstalled with the software. There’s a calendar module that can display the contents of your Google, Microsoft, or Apple calendars. There’s a weather module that can display current weather and forecasts. There’s a news feed to keep you up-to-date with what’s happening in the world. It’s basically like a customized news station for your daily life.

But what makes Magic Mirror so powerful and useful is not actually the modules that it comes with, rather, it’s all the extra modules available for you to add to it. If you’re into stocks, there are a number of modules you can add to display what you need to inform your investment decisions. If you don’t like the default weather app, there are over a dozen more that you can choose from. There are even modules that integrate voice and facial recognition to allow everyone in your home or office a personalized experience.

How to install Magic Mirror

To install MagicMirror2 you’re going to need some type of computer to run the software. Most people opt to use a Raspberry Pi SBC (that’s what the Magic Mirror maintainers test their updates on) but you could use just about any post–Raspberry Pi 3 SBC and get it working. It’s even possible to get it up and running on Windows.

Once you’ve settled on a device, head over to MagicMirror2’s installation page to find instructions for your use case. If you’re using a Raspberry Pi, the easiest way to go about installation is to use this community-made script that will do all the hard work for you, and set up the device so that it automatically starts up Magic Mirror when you power on.

bash -c "$(curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sdetweil/MagicMirror_scripts/master/raspberry.sh)"

How to use the Magic Mirror

Magic Mirror is basically a web page that runs on your Raspberry Pi and is displayed full screen on a monitor or TV. By editing the configuration file, you can change which modules are displayed on the screen, where they are displayed, and how they behave.

To add a new module, you have to find the repository for it on GitHub. There are over 1,000 Magic Mirror modules to choose from. Thankfully, the maintainer of the project also maintains a search engine to make finding modules much easier. Once you’ve found what you want, you’ll have to clone the repo onto your machine and add any dependencies the module needs. After that, just add the module details to your configuration file, reset Magic Mirror, and the new module will be ready to use. Check out our picks for the best Magic Mirror modules to get more details about installing them.

If you like the functionality of your module, but you’re not quite happy with how it looks, you can change it to your liking by modifying your custom.css file. Magic Mirror is essentially just a fancy web page, so if you know CSS, you can change practically every aspect of how your Magic Mirror looks. One intrepid user even reskinned their Magic Mirror to look like a Pip-Boy from Fallout, entirely from the CSS file.

Why is it called a mirror?

So the original idea behind the Magic Mirror was to place your TV or monitor behind a two-way mirror. This is the reason for the mostly black-and-white aesthetic behind the UI. The white text is visible through the two-way mirror while everywhere black just looks like a mirror.

There are a few different ways to go about making your display into a mirror if you want to go that route. The cheapest is to buy a film to convert glass or acrylic into a two-way mirror. However, the online consensus seems to be that this is a bad idea and produces very bad results. The next step up is to buy a sheet of two-way acrylic. This is a nice balance between cost and quality. The best looking option would be to get a glass two-way mirror, but this is also the most expensive route.

Of course, you don’t have to involve a mirror at all. Magic Mirror will work just fine as a non-reflective dashboard. You can get as creative as you want to with the display or dashboard itself, to make it enchanting in your own way.