What is MERLIN?
MERLIN (Mirror with Environmental Reporting and Linguistics INterface)
I like backronyms, but this one was a stretch. MERLIN is a Raspberry Pi powered Magic Mirror, also called a Smart Mirror. A piece of partially-reflective glass over a computer monitor appears to be a normal mirror where the monitor is black, but white text can shine through, appearing to be on the surface of the otherwise normal mirror.
Lots of projects have been published that use a Raspberry Pi to control a smart mirror interface but, at the time, all of them constantly displayed the information (like the weather) on the screen. I wanted to make a mirror that looked entirely normal and only displayed the desired information when prompted with a voice command. The goal was to make something that looked less busy than a normal smart mirror. You could display a lot more information in the same space by only seeing one thing at a time. MERLIN would also be able to interact with you and modify the information upon request (double that recipe).
Can I get the code?
MERLIN’s code is a mess. It runs on Python 2.7. The Speech-to-Text is very limited, not very accurate, needs to be started manually from the console, and uses hard-coded lists generated by software that doesn’t exist anymore. The Text-to-Speech technology at the time was not great, so all of MERLIN’s responses are hard-coded MP3s. As I said, it is a mess.
I am currently rewriting all of MERLIN’s programs and functions into more flexible, and hopefully better versions. If it all works out, I will make the code available.