Spectre

I spent eight weeks of my third semester working with four other students to create a voice-controlled smart mirror and cabinet system that can show a variety of information at the user’s behest as well as open and close at the middle. This was our final project in Principles of Engineering, and our team name was Spectre (which is Latin for reflection or ghost and somehow relates to the smart mirror idea in a clever way). Below you can see a rendering of our final design.

Our team of five was split into three subteams: Mechanical, Electrical, and Software. I was on the Software subteam with one other student, Sung. Sung took point on figuring out the speech recognition and chatbot, while I focused on using a number of APIs to add various functions to our mirror as well as integrating the speech recognition to allow for user interaction.

You can find more information about the software side of our project on the Software section of our website. The lists of software features and widgets incorporated in our smart mirror encapsulate my contributions to this project.

We run through Spectre’s features in the videos below. We show the software features in the first video (before our UI was optimized for a smaller screen), and we open and close the mirror in the second and third, respectively.

With the exception of the Arduino code, we stuck to Python. You can check out our Github repository here. We have extensive documentation for our project on our website, including a DIY section!