Getting your first screen on the wall

Before you start

You need two things open: the portal in a browser you are comfortable typing into, and the screen app on whatever you are putting on the wall. They do not have to be the same machine and usually are not — the point of a six-character code is that you can pair a screen in a hallway from a laptop in the kitchen.

If you have no hardware yet, do not buy any. Open the screen app on a spare laptop or tablet and pair that. It is a real Mirra screen for as long as it stays open, and it is the fastest way to find out whether the product suits you before a Raspberry Pi arrives in the post.

The whole path, in order

Nine steps, and only two of them involve typing anything you have to be careful about.

1. Choose a plan on the front page

   The main button in the hero takes you to the pricing section rather than straight to a sign-up form — it reads Choose your plan while the page is set to For home and See commercial plans when you switch it to For business. Free plans show Start free; paid ones show Choose followed by the plan name. A plan this installation cannot take money for shows Talk to us instead of quietly signing you up to something else.

2. Create your household

   You land on the sign-in page with Create account already selected. Fill in Your name, Household name, Email and a password of at least eight characters, then press Create household. Leave the household name blank and it becomes "your name's home", which you can change later.

3. Pay, if you picked a paid plan

   You are handed to the payment provider straight after the account is made, while the choice is fresh. If checkout cannot start you are told so and sent to your plan page rather than being quietly dropped onto Free.

4. Open the screen app on the display

   Go to the screen address on the device you are putting on the wall and put the browser full screen — F11 on Windows and Linux, Control-Command-F on a Mac. Within a moment it shows a six-character code, the line "Enter this code in your Mirra portal to pair this screen", and underneath it "portal → Screens → Pair a screen".

5. Press Pair a screen

   In the portal you are on Screens, the first entry in the bar. The Pair a screen button sits at the top right of the Screens heading. With no screens paired yet, the panel below reads "No screens yet" and tells you the same thing.

6. Say what you are putting Mirra on

   The dialog opens on Add a screen rather than on a code box, because the first time round you probably do not have a code yet. Pick the card that matches your hardware. Each one opens onto How to set it up, What is good about it, and What to know first — read the last list; it is the honest one.

7. Type the code and name the screen

   Below the chosen hardware's notes are two fields. Code shown on the screen takes the six characters, upper-cased as you type. Screen name is where the display is — Kitchen, Hall, Reception. Press Pair. The button stays disabled until the code is six characters long.

8. The screen goes live

   The display stops showing the code and starts showing a scene called Main. It checks every three seconds, so it changes over within a few seconds of you pressing Pair. It is now listed on Screens with an online pill and the date it was paired.

9. Open it and make it yours

   Click the screen's card on Screens to open its editor. Drag widgets around, resize them by their corner, add more from the Add widget palette underneath, then press Save & push. The header shows "Unsaved changes" when there are any, and confirms with "Saved & pushed ✓".

Which hardware to choose

The Add a screen dialog offers six routes, four of which you can pair today. They are listed here in the order the dialog shows them.

A browser on a computer

Any computer with a modern browser. Costs nothing, works in a minute, and the camera and microphone are available so you can try the assistant, presence and gestures. It ties up a machine, and sleep, screensavers and updates will interrupt it — nothing restarts it if it closes.Default: Free — start here

A Raspberry Pi

The proper version. Boots straight to Mirra with no desktop, a watchdog restarts the browser if it dies, camera and microphone work, and it is the only route that supports a wired button. You are assembling it — board, power supply, SD card, screen and a mount — and first setup takes twenty minutes rather than one. A Pi 4 or newer is worth it; older boards struggle with the animated faces.Default: Recommended

A mini PC

An Intel mini PC running Ubuntu Desktop. Does everything the Pi does plus live camera video and Spotify playing out of the mirror itself. Two to four times the price, bigger and hungrier, and no GPIO pins, so the wired button stays Pi-only.Default: Most capable

A smart TV

Many TV browsers will run Mirra with no extra hardware at all. TV browsers are often slow, most have no camera or microphone, and many sleep or close the browser on a timer with nothing to restart it. Try it before you rely on it.Default: Works on many

Mirra Compute Device

A module that plugs into any HDMI screen and pairs itself from your phone. Listed but not available — choosing it offers no code box, only the line "There is nothing to pair yet — we will announce this when it ships."Default: Coming soon

Mirra Mirror Display

Mirror glass, display and computer in one frame, ready to hang. Also listed and also not available yet.Default: Coming soon

There is a fuller guide at Set up a screen, in the menu under your name. It is reachable signed out too, because people research hardware before they buy.

What you get the moment it pairs

A screen paired with nothing on it would be a black rectangle, so Mirra gives every new screen a scene called Main with six widgets already placed. It is deliberately ordinary — a starting point to edit rather than a design to admire.

If your household has an integration switched off, the widgets belonging to it are left out of that starter scene rather than placed and then refused. A household with Calendar turned off gets a Main scene with no agenda on it.

The starter weather widget is set to Durham. Select it in the editor and change Place name, Latitude and Longitude to where you actually live — the widget will happily report someone else's weather for years if you let it.

Editing what it shows

The editor is the page you reach by clicking a screen on Screens. The grid in the middle is the scene; everything else acts on it.

1. Turn the preview on

   Preview off in the toolbar is a toggle. Switched on it reads Preview on, and the real widgets draw behind the layout grid, so you are arranging the actual clock and the actual photographs rather than grey boxes.

2. Add a widget

   The Add widget panel sits under the grid, grouped by category. Core widgets add straight away; an integration's widgets are collected behind one entry ending in an ellipsis, which opens a picker. An integration you have switched off is not offered at all, and a line at the foot of the panel names it and links to Integrations so you know where the switch is.

3. Place and size it

   Drag it where it belongs and drag its corner to size it. Widgets snap to the twelve-column grid and are allowed to overlap, which is how a photograph fills the screen with a clock over the top of it.

4. Adjust its appearance

   Select a widget and its settings panel appears below, with an Appearance section: Layer for stacking, Surface for the panel behind it, Align and Vertical for where the content sits, plus Size, Opacity and a text shadow for legibility over photography. Fill screen sets a widget to the whole grid; Remove deletes it.

5. Save & push

   Nothing reaches the wall until you press it. The button is disabled while there is nothing to save, and the header shows "Saved & pushed ✓" when the screen has been told.

If the code does not work

Pairing fails for a small number of reasons and the dialog tells you which, but two of them are easier to spot if you already know about them.

• A code lasts ten minutes. Past that the screen shows a fresh one, and the portal answers "That code isn't valid — check the screen for a fresh one." — look at the display again rather than retyping the old one.
• Codes never contain I, L, O, 0 or 1, so a character that looks like one of those is something else. Ambiguous letters were left out of the alphabet on purpose.
• "This screen is already paired" means the display belongs to a household already. Unpair it from its own screen page first.
• On the Free plan, pairing a second screen is refused with "Your plan covers 1 screen. Upgrade to pair another." Nothing is broken; the limit is doing its job.
• Too many attempts in a row from the same address are turned away with "Too many pairing attempts. Try again shortly." Wait rather than keep typing.
• No code at all means the screen could not reach Mirra to ask for one. It stays blank and reloads itself every five seconds until it can, so this is almost always the device having no internet yet rather than a problem with Mirra.