Hi, Steven here from Core Electronics and welcome to the Infinity Mirror Kit Version 2 assembly guide. In this video, I'm going to show you everything you need to know to assemble your Infinity Mirror Kit Version 2.

A little bit about the modes on the finished kit, there will be a knob on the back when you're finished. The knob all the way to the right will be off, so nothing on the LEDs. The first position as you turn the knob, will be a rainbow effect, then we'll have a colour fade effect and the colour that it's on when you change to a different mode will stay that colour for other effects, then we have a comet effect, a solid colour and a fade in and out to change the brightness, in the fade in and out we'll save for other modes as well and then if we go all the way back to off, it resets our settings, so they're back to normal. So, let's start on making it ourselves and see how we go.

So, the first step to putting the Infinity mirror together is to, take the paper off all the layers of acrylic, they all come with paper on them to protect them while they're in transit. So, we just peel off an edge using the paper peeler if you like, that makes a lot easier and then pull the paper away. The first one we want to start with or the last one we want to peel the paper off I should say, is a clear panel and immediately after removing the paper we want to put it down on a clean surface so we don't get any fingerprints on it, this is the layer that will put our reflective film on. So, to put the film on, we first want to get the acrylic wet with a little bit of soapy water, so I've got a little bit of water here in a glass and I put one drop of dish soap in it. That's all it takes and I'm just going to sprinkle it on to my acrylic with my fingers. If you have a spray bottle that's great, you can get a nice coat of water with a spray bottle but if not sprinkling it on with your fingers is fine and you don't want to get it too wet but you want to have enough that water will move to all edges of the acrylic when you put on your film.

So, next we get our piece of mirrored film and this is what really gives the Infinity Mirror effect, so I'll peel back one corner to reveal the two layers and we want to peel away the clear layer from the mirrored layer. So, as you can see, I've got one half as clear the other half is the mirrored tint and again being very careful, not to touch the adhesive side of this with your fingers because it'll leave fingerprints that you won't be able to remove. I'm going to lay it down on top of my kit or on top of my acrylic sheet and I'll use a credit card starting in the middle and working out to smooth out any bubbles that are underneath and if you need to peel back up the edges. Therefore, it's good to get the whole thing wet, so it doesn't stick before you're ready for it and just push all the water that's on your acrylic between the two pieces out the sides with your credit card and so we have a nice bubble free connection. So, there we have it.

The acrylic now has the sheet on it and all the bubbles are squeezed out, be careful again not to touch this with your fingers because it's going to be difficult to remove any fingerprints later on and we're going to take the hobby knife, one of the tools that we need for this assembly is a hobby knife, the other is a screwdriver and some wire cutters and a soldering iron. So we're going to take a hobby knife and just trim around the edge of the film, all the way around the panel as flush as possible and if you have a little bit of excess don't worry about it, we can get it later, just make sure that all your edges are completely cut off, I have one kind of hanging on down here, you don't want to pull your film back up as you try to remove the excess

Then the next step is to where the holes are in the acrylic, we want to take our hobby knife and kind of cut a little circle, it doesn't need to be perfect, just so we can get the bolt through that corner without wrinkling up our mirrored film. So now that we have this step ready, I'm going to take this sheet, I've got some paper towels here that I'll use just to wipe off a little bit of the smudges and things that happened, while we were spreading it out with a card because this will continue to show up later. So, this is our last chance to get it nice and clean and then we'll take this and put it film down over another sheet of acrylic. So, what I've done is, I've taken another clear sheet of acrylic, I put the long bolts through the holes facing up ready to go and cinch sandwich the film between them. Feed the bolts through the holes and press the mirrored sheet all the way down to the bottom.

So, the next step is to take our pieces they're labelled, A and they are the body of our mirror, they are where the LEDs attach. So, I'll take my A pieces and stack them all up and slide them over the bolts as well. Now you notice that it doesn't particularly matter what the orientation is, but you want all of them to be oriented the same. So, the notch in the corner all lines up, I’ve chosen to make the bottom of the mirror facing me, so I lined up all the letter A's along the bottom and from now on that'll be the bottom of the mirror. So, I push them down over the bolts till they're completely seated and then the next step is preparing our LED strips, so I'll just set this aside for now and we need to solder our wires onto our LED strips. So, you'll have an LED strip in the kit with 44 LEDs in it and one side will have a small white arrow pointing at the LEDs and the other end should be flush. So, we want to solder to the side with the small arrows and the small copper pads exposed to it.

So, the first step to soldering, is we need to tin the pads on our LED strip. So to do that I'm going to put a tiny bit of solder on my soldering iron, just to tin the tip, I'll hold it on to the pass on the LED strip and I'll do it put a touch more solder on the pad itself, until when I take a soldering iron away I'm left with a little bubble of solder on the pad itself. A little bit more on this middle one, there we go and it's also good practice to tin your wires as well. Just to make sure everything's going to stick, once we try to solder it together. So, I'll take my wires and do the same thing, just put them on the soldering iron, touch a little bit of solder to them, not much might stick but it doesn't take much, and it gets that solder process started. So, what I've done is, I've taken the wires in the kit and I've given the ends just a little bit of a 90-degree bend and I've trimmed off the insulation stripped them out a backup about 1 mil.

So next, we want to connect our wires. So, the orientation that you want to have the wires is the 5 volt or red wire should be moving away from the strip. So, if you're unclear about this, it's pictured in the in the written instructions for the Infinity Mirror Kit. So, I'll start with the 5-volt wire and just touch my soldering iron to it, a little bit too much solder on there, so I'll just clean that off and there we have it because we tin the pad and tin the wires before we started. All we need to do is stick it straight on and reheat the solder and then the data lines next to and now our ground now. The reason that I bent the wires before soldering them is it the pads on the LED strip are fragile. So, if we saw to the wires on when they're straight and bend them afterwards, we stand a good chance of tearing them off the solder pads and then we may not be able to solder it again later. So that is our LED strips soldered and ready to go. So, I'll set those aside for now and we'll go back to our mirror.

The next step is to secure the LEDs into the mirror, so what I'm going to do is take the double-sided tape that's included in the in the kit and starting from the notch in the corner, I'm going to stick in the double-sided tape, roll it out to the edge, almost to the corner and then using the hobby knife again just trim it off, this way we will adhesive the flat strips that run down each side. So, I'll just repeat that for each side, start in a corner roll the double-sided tape out, trying to keep it as flat as possible and then cutting it off near the corner, so we get a nice connection to the LED strips. Now this sum this step, might seem like an easy one to kind of rush through but if you're not careful when you're adhering your LED strips or your double-sided tape to your kit, then later on, when you're looking at you're looking at your Infinity mirror kit, you might notice the LED strips have fallen away from the edge and you no longer have a nice perfect square but kind of a lopsided square looking back at you. So this is something that's kind of hard to fix later on, so it's best to get it done properly the first time around, so I'm just going to run my fingers around, pressing all the tape in firmly, to make sure it's stuck and then I'll go around and peel up the top paper layer from each strip, leaving this the tacky part exposed.

So now we need to lay in our LED strips. So, with the wires pointing up and the wires starting in the cut-out notch that we have in light in the layers A I'm going to set the LED strip all the way down into the groove and press it in place. Now we want the end of the LED strip to be far into the holes so that if you're looking at this edge here the LED strip ends flush with this inside edge of the bottom of the mirror. The idea being that, once we get to the corner up here and get to a bend, the bend will be right in the middle between two LEDs rather than on an LED, so I'm going to push it down as far as I can to the bottom of the mirror and just working my way around, I'm going to lightly put the LEDs in for now. When you get to the corner push the LED strip all the way into the corner, so it has a nice bend there and again pushing into the corner making sure that the LEDs are strip is stuck all the way all the way down again, it's easy to fix now but it'll be very hard to fix later, until we get all the way to the end. So, there's that last LED strip in and there we go.

So that's the LED strip installed, the next step is to put our mirror panel in place. So, the mirrored panel easy to spot has the grey backing and there's a small hole in one of the corners on the mirror. So that's the hole that our wires will need to go through. So, we'll feed the wires through the hole, the mirror will point down into the box that we have in work and the grey side will be up, again when putting them here in place. We want to be as careful as possible, not to get fingerprints on it because that's something that you may be able to see throughout the life of your mirror and it's not as quite as critical is with this piece the other piece because it's kind of hidden within the lights, but they might show up.

So, now we have our mirror in place, I've got my wires pointing up out of the box and now it's time for our layer B. So, one of our first back panel and its labelled B on the bottom and we'll just feed our wires through the opening, slot the panel into place and then we have we're left with this groove for our wires to fit through. Our next step is to take some of the nuts that were provided in the kit and there's these hexagon shaped holes that will fit the nuts into, they'll press into place and this kind of acts as a nut plate for some of the layers to attach to and you want to make sure that they're sitting flat otherwise it'll be difficult later on to feed your bolts into them.

So, there we have my nuts are in place. Now we'll take layer to see our next backing layer and before we put it on, we want to route our wires through the groove very carefully because later on if the wires are between these two panels it'll spread our panels apart and again, this is one of those steps it's easy to do now and harder to do later. So, we'll carefully bend our wires down into the groove, we want to be careful not to move them around at the corner here very much because we don't want to work those solder connections that go into the LED strips.

So we'll carefully lay this last panel down on top making sure the wires are still in their groove, as we put it down and they are and for now we'll just take a couple of the remaining nuts and loosely put them in place on the four corners and then we'll take the first of our backing plates which is going to be labelled D and we'll feed our wires through the small hole in the panel. So, they come up, this is where our potentiometer will be, and this is where the board will sit before we do that, I almost forgot there are two spots to put two more nuts the last two in the kit in these little hexagon shaped nut plates. So now that panel C is installed on the back and we have our nuts in place, we're just going to take panel D, it's the first of our small panels, feed the wires through the hole and take our last small panel which is unmarked and put it on top. For the small bolts, we'll go in the corners of these panels. Now we don't need to make the bolts very tight just not enough, so the panels don't wiggle around relative to one another or that the bolts come loose. Now, this is a good time to also check the four corners of your mirror and make sure those bolts are tight as well, just so using your fingers to hold the nut on the back and I'm tightening it up with the screwdriver from the front.

So the next step is to solder the wires onto our potentiometer, the wires that come in your kit that are currently soldered to your lights (are going to be your lights are much longer than what you see here because I've already trimmed the wire of) but you're going to want to cut about 70 mils off. So, leave just enough wire sticking up out so you can easily solder your trinket and push it down into place, later without the wires getting too bunched up and then again, we want the there's probably a little excess on the wires that'll be remaining. So, if you look for scale these wires just barely don't reach pitch from screw to screw on the small panel make them about that length. So, we have just enough slack to solder to the potentiometer itself and then to the trinket without the wire too much wire being caught up inside the mirror.

So, I've got my potentiometer here set up in a pair of helping hands, but you could do it on a table if you like. If you have the potentiometers so the knobs pointing towards you, you're going to have the black wire on the right, white in the middle and red on the left. So, I'm just going to feed the wires through the holes, I've removed about two mil of insulation from the wire and they should just sit in place while I solder. So, there we go next, we want to solder our trinket into the mirror.

So back to the mirror, I'm going to use the helping hands again, but you can carefully do this without helping hands again but we're going to put the red wire into the USB pin on the trinket. So, this since we're going to be powering the device off the USB connection. The USB goes straight to the USB cord as a power source and kind of bypasses the circuitry of the trinket itself and this makes that pin the one that can handle the most amperage the data line, the white wire, will go to pin zero, which is just below the USB. Now the ground wire for the trinket will solder to the ground pin on the far side of the board, next we're going to solder on the potentiometer.

So, the ground wire for the potentiometer will go to pin 1. Now it now's a good time before we before we get any farther to route, the wires from the potentiometer in a way that they'll probably likely sit when they're in the mirror because it'll be easier to do that now so I'll take the nut and the washer off the potentiometer a good way is to bend the wires back underneath the potentiometer carefully. Then I'm going to have that make them take a right turn and then come back up. So first, I'll put the ground wire on pin 1 the white data wire will go to pin to wire came back out there we are, and the red wire will go to five volts.

So now that our all our connections are made, now is the ideal time to check to make sure our mirror is working the way we expect it to. So, I'll just plug into a 5-volt power supply, turn the potentiometer and confirm that we are getting some lights. So well unplug the board seems like everything's working electrically, take the last panel which is clear feed in the potentiometer and attach it with the washer and the nut and we'll try to work the work that shrinks it down into position. So carefully, arrange the wires through the hole, we gently press they trinket down into place and then position the panel on top of it.

Now we want to wiggle the wires around as little as possible there, so once you've got it in place try to just leave it in place. We'll take the last two bolts put them through the centre hole on each side. We'll turn the potentiometer all the way to the left or counterclockwise it, insert the knob with the arrow, pointing down to the left, so that will be the off position, all the way the right will be the brightness position and there you have it.

Your very own Infinity Mirror Kit, now we're ready to plug it in again and turn the knob to change the modes. So, we also have some of the parts in the kit some little legs for the mirror in the bottom, you'll notice there are a couple small holes these legs slide into place and allow you to display the mirror at an angle to give it a slightly different effect. So, there you have it, that's our instructions on how to assemble the Infinity Mirror Kit Version 2.

Thanks for watching.