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I am building a Smart Mirror for a school project and I need a way to give the user an interface where they can search and connect to a network.

Unfortunately, my Raspberry Pi stopped working (doesn’t boot for some reason) to overcome this, I am going to code and test on my Windows laptop, then run the code on another Raspberry Pi that I will be borrowing from elsewhere. I am quite new to Python, and I want to know if there is a way to use a universal module where I can test this on Windows while knowing that it will work on a Raspberry Pi.

Any help and suggestions are much appreciated,

Sid.

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A lot of modules on windows will not work for raspbian because it is a debian derivative. So it could be that you have to change different modules you´ve been working on windows, because they are not running on raspbian. It is not always in general , it depends on the packages you use.

So i would prefer (i do the same, if i develope modules, which should be runnable on windows and linux machines) that you use VMs like VirtualBox https://www.virtualbox.org/ or VMware.

On this VM you install debian (because raspbian is a debian derivative) and then you develope your modules on this VM. If you finished with developing, so you can test it on a real hardware like Raspberry pi.

Example:

https://grantwinney.com/how-to-create-a-raspberry-pi-virtual-machine-vm-in-virtualbox/

Of course you cannot use the physically hardware of the raspberry pi like gpio´s. But you can write a software that is imitate the behaviour of the output of this gpio´s

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  • Will the hardware related stuff work? I need to search available WiFi connections then let the user to connect to them
    – SidS
    Commented Jan 28, 2018 at 14:55
  • not all hardware will work, like gpio i mentioned before. But the wifi connection is on both the same so you can write the program for searching and connecting to available wifi´s. Related files /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf are the same on both.
    – bierschi
    Commented Jan 28, 2018 at 15:00
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I have two laptops, and one of them runs Ubuntu. This is easier to me than running virtualbox, but I'm lazy.

A more affordable solution would be to purchase a used PC and put the Linux distribution of your choice. Debian and its offspring (like Ubuntu) would probably be the best because Raspian is also a Debian derivative.

I agree with @bierschi that the gpio's would be difficult to emulate, but you could write a library to simulate the gpio's in software. Besides, it sounds like you're taking input from a camera and sending the output to a screen. You might have to put a wrapper on a library meant for a USB camera to act like the Raspberry Pi camera if you're using that.

In fact, emulating a Raspberry Pi under Windows or Linux is such a neat idea that it has already been done! QEMU already does this! Disclaimer: I've never tried this for myself.

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  • I’m using 2 way acrylic so I don’t really need to use a camera to display an artificial reflection
    – SidS
    Commented Jan 28, 2018 at 14:54
  • Then I misunderstood what you meant by a "smart mirror." But my answer still stands.
    – NomadMaker
    Commented Jan 28, 2018 at 14:58
  • Indeed, i have tried running a QEMU emulation, but the emulation was way too slow, I might run a Debian VM or install Debian on an old PC. Thanks!
    – SidS
    Commented Jan 28, 2018 at 15:00

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