G’day! Following our Infinity Mirror table project I thought I'd create a miniaturized one that's sized for a tabletop or desktop, so if you don't know what Infinity Mirror is you can see this optical illusion which is almost like a tunnel of light that's cutting into space because this is a very small thin object.

So this illusion is created by a single strip of LEDs inside this box that's sandwiched between two mirrors, only the front one of which is semi reflective so you have the light bouncing back and forth inside the box with a bit leaking out each time, creating that tunnel of light effect, let's take a closer look. So I'm just holding the mirror at a bit of an angle here, so you can see that optical illusion and you can see it's currently running this colour wheel around the outside quite slowly and if I move this knob on the back I can cycle through a couple of the modes, so of course the first mode which is just the off state, then we have this colour wheel which I think is my favourite because it really shows  the value of these addressable LEDs. Moving along we have this kind of comet with a tail that's racing around the outside, so it'll be pretty cool to implement say more comets that race around in different directions, have different colours and as they cross they can interact by having their colours sum together to show that interaction, I think that would be pretty neat and finally just a solid tunnel of kind of orange/red light which really effectively shows the depth of that infinity mirror tunnel.

So just flipping the mirror over for a moment so you can see what drives the whole show, we have this small control box hanging off the back let's take a closer look at that. So I've just zoomed in on the small control box at the back and you can see that there's not very much going on, this is a really simple project electronically all we have is a particle photon that's embedded in this acrylic here with the control knob on the back, that's just mode knob at the moment the particle is just powered by this USB cable, it's running through a little hook just to give it some strain relief so that it doesn't break if we tug on it, it takes the strain away from the USB connector but really aside from the pot and the photon there's just a few wires running through an internal tunnel out to the LED strip that's inside the mirror box and here you can see just how thin the Infinity mirror is properly I think it's about less than 40mm in depth so it really has a very small footprint for the illusion that it creates.

Now this project has been driven by a particle photon for a very specific reason and that is that we think a display like this on a desktop is just begging to be used as some kind of Internet connected device, some kind of status indicator for whatever you like. So there's already very mature services available like the particle cloud and if, this, then, that or IFTTT that can be integrated so that this can be connected to pretty much whatever web service you can think of and use to display some information about that. Now every piece of hardware in this project that isn't of course the Electronics was cut on our brand-new laser cutter and I've prepared a short video to show you what that looks like, so here's the laser cutter midway through a cut, it's cutting at the moment some small panels for that rear control box and every single panel on this is a certain type of acrylic be it a clear acrylic, for the clear front, a black acrylic for the body and a special mirrored acrylic that you can actually cut on a laser cutter for that back mirror so just those three different types of materials have come together to make this entire project.

Now the project didn't always look as good as it currently does, I've prototyped at first with just clear acrylic so this prototype you can see this gray colour is the back pain of that special merit acrylic but here is the prototype that I was working with so there's a few cut out layers for the box, of course that special merit acrylic and then on the back I found this is especially helpful prototyping and clear though because this control box has quite a few internal features that I wouldn't have been able to see if I were prototyping with the black acrylics straight away so I could see the alignment of various features that hold the photon in place the alignment of this tunnel that carries wires internally to a small tiny little hole in the corner of the mirror for the wires to come through and then connect to the LED strip so that is the prototype in all its glory.

A feature that I think is quite neat and that I'm a little bit proud of is this rear control box where you have four screws holding the control box in place and then two screws which just hold this top panel on, so you can just by taking out two screws service any electrical connections you have to without the whole thing falling apart, so you can see I can take those screws out and that panel just lifts away leaving an intact control box and this has been done using some embedded nuts, some captive nuts embedded within the larger layers below so that looks something like this where you have a hexagonal hole instant acrylic that you can easily press fit and not pin to and that creates this kind of this friction fit that holds the nut in place and of course it's sandwiched between some layers of acrylic, so this isn't going anywhere.

Now the code for this project is very much still in development, so if there are any features that you would like to see in a desktop sized Wi-Fi enabled web connected IR LED infinity mirror, then absolutely drop us a comment in the comment section below we'd love to hear from you I'll see you next time!