G'day, welcome to the warehouse, I thought I'd show you a project that I've just finished, it's simple to build doesn't break the bank and I call it the infinity mirror table. So at the moment what you're seeing is this optical illusion created by a single strip of LEDs that's kind of sandwiched between two mirrors the top one of which is only semi reflective so you get this cool, tunnel of light appearing and at the moment we have this slowly moving rainbow pattern going around the perimeter. With some controls at the front I can speed that pattern up so that'll be a little faster okay now you can see the pattern is moving around a lot faster and you can see the colors rising across the back and I'll show you a couple of other modes, so you can select the modes with the simple controls at the front here we have a full brightness white and we can take the brightness down or you can set it to a single static color so if you just want a static installation then you can set it to whichever color you like from that color wheel. The final mode, which is a little bit experimental at this point, is this comet mode so what I am visages for there to be multiples of this comet racing around the table maybe in different directions but of different colors and as they cross they interact by their colors summing together I think that would be quite a neat display.

Okay back in the comfort of the lab now if you were thinking of trying your hand at this project yourself I'll take you for a short dive through the build logs and share some of the things that I've learnt with you while I was making this project. Straight up a couple of basic skills that were either necessary or built during the project basically working power electronics and we learn how to use addressable LEDs, of course, the material is used I won't go into that too much but the key players are of course the top layer which I chose to be acrylic you could choose glass the bottom layer which was mirror glass and then a reflective privacy film which really amplifies that tunnel of light infinity mirror effect. The whole thing driving the show is a Particle Photon and there's just some supporting electronics for that like that the knobs, the potentiometers, logic level shifters. The electronics of this project a very simple on the electrical side. The tools used were quite simple I used a mitre saw primarily the only kind of a little bit exotic tool was a router, so if you don't have a router you might just have to think about borrowing one or a different method of Sandwiching those two pieces of acrylic or glass onto the frame. So yeah a little bit of room for creativity there.

So the frame was made up of these four identical side pieces and you can see here that one of the corners has been routed out that's where the mirror drops in so this is kind of like upside down at the moment the mirror drops into the routed corner and the acrylic which is pictured along here slides into this top slot. So I'll scroll down a little further you can see this is this is where we have the frame pretty much set up for gluing, so three sides are being glued down here and one side is being left free it's only being screwed into the rest of the frame this way we can take one of the one side of the frame out to slide the mirror and of course the acrylic on top imagine if you had to say an LED fail months down the track and you're like AH NO, I've closed the entire box around these LED strips I've got no way to service it so I thought this might be a nice way to kind of make it an access hatch.

Coming down a little further, this is the acrylic sheet that you can see, a photo of me just kind of applying that semi reflective film to so the film was kind of cut out around the shape just to get to a rough size and then the acrylic was misted with a kind of spray bottle just with a tiny amount of detergent like literally one maybe two drops of washing-up detergent, you can see that the spray bottle in the back there. Then the film is applied over the top and carefully all the other water and air bowls were scraped out using just a bank card.

Now coming down a little further we're looking at the bottom of the table here and specifically, we're looking at one corner. Because I was originally going to go with one of these right angled brackets to hold the legs straight, I decided to thicken the table up just on the corners with these off cut pieces of plywood, but I kind of thought that these brackets these are shelving brackets from Bunnings, I kind of thought that they might look a bit weird like the table would look very flimsy and I decided to go with kind of like a zero cost solution which these gussets or braces just made of off cut plywood. So with the miter saw, just cutting out of these pieces to use as the corner brace for each leg rather than having to buy eight of these brackets instead which kind of makes this stiffener plate redundant but there is a long screw going down into the leg and I guess this is just more material for it to bite into and of course there are liquid nails everywhere and wood glue. So that's pretty much it for the physical build; the things that I might change to use a thicker piece of ply initially they wouldn't even have to bother making up these plates but if you're really pinching the pennies then you can save a bit of money by going for a thin sheet of ply and then you can just thicken it out using offcuts to create these thickening plates on the corner so there's there's a good economical alternative.

The electronics, as I said, really really simple. There's a single 5V supply powering the whole show, so it's a 5 volt 10A supply and that comes into power the Particle Photon and of course to power the LED strip I'll show you a breakdown of that in a moment but just looking at the control side of things we have a Particle Photon that's taking in 5 volts and pushing out 3.3 volts. There are three potentiometers and they're all just wired into the analog inputs of the particle photon so this is our user interface and potentiometers are kind of good for this because even though you've only got three knobs you can you can very easily change how your interface works just by carving out different sectors of rotation to perform different functions so you might remember that I had one of the pots set up as a mode selector knob so really it's entire rotational range was really just carved out into four modes I only showed you three modes the default mode is just off so there's an easy way to turn it off and yeah this is just really really easy to use and configure.

So the reason we have the logic level shifter to here is because the Particle Photon is a 3.3V device and well I think it spins might be 5 volt tolerant I wasn't sure about driving the LED strip from a 3.3 volt logic signal so I decided to just stick in a logic level shifter just in case which takes our 3.3 volts digital signal from the d0 pin of the photon and passes it through as a 5 volt digital signal to the LED strip which is what the LED strip is expecting to receive so really all we have is a microcontroller and a single digital pin being used to drive the LED strip these pots aren't even necessary for the project to be complete if you just wanted to run in some automatic mode.

Now this is where the power electronics comes in, I was a little I was a little unsure about the voltage drop across the length of the LED strip so I decided I would inject power at two points both at the start of the strip so here we have the start of the LED strip which kind of approximates this point on the diagram here you can think of this as the feed point so we have 5V, data and ground being fed into one side of the table and then it loops around the table and by the time it hits the third corner that's where I inject 5 volts and ground again just to pick up any voltage drop that may have occurred over the length of tape here. If you have a length of tape that's too long you can start to get color inconsistencies like if you drive a very long strip of tape (a very long strip of LEDs sorry) completely white you might find that the ones towards the end kind of go a bit yellow because the voltage is actually diving off towards the end so that's the reason for that. Now you'll see here that we have a free end here so this is actually how the removable part of the table is going to come out, the piece of table won't come all the way out completely it will still be connected at one end with a couple of wires but this can just be folded out of the way. I don't think I had a very clear picture of that but this just shows you how the wiring actually reaches the LED strip so here we have this side piece of the frame which has the slot for the acrylic and the slot for the mirror of course and then all I've done is drilled one hole through the side and then one hole through the bottom to feed these cables up and through to power the LED strip, because remember the LED strip is captured between am impenetrable piece of mirror glass and an impenetrable piece of acrylic. So the only way to come in is really through that same face that the LED is glued to and I just use super glue for that.

Here's a here's a quick picture showing those wires coming out and I thought about going for all black wires just to keep them really really discreet but I found that once the tables are running it doesn't matter having a white and a red wire really because the ideas are so dazzling they just get lost in all the color so that's just showing where the wires are coming out and here we have the control box finally assembled under the table.

So this is a 3d printed control box, I've got a quick time-lapse of that actually thought I might show you. So here we have the 3d printed enclosure being printed now, I decided to print the enclosure because I originally was going to be using a 12-volt main power supply and a couple of switching regulators inside the control box but I thought there would be maybe quite a lot of heat being dissipated inside this control box and then it's needlessly complicated so it was easier just to go for a higher rated 5 volt supply and ditch those switching regulators entirely. They were originally going to be sitting on the standoffs that you might have seen printed but this is the control box as it stands and as you can see yeah just a Photon, logic level shifting and three knobs.

Power comes on the side and these white cables, this is just speaker wire, so with speaker wire you have one side that has a stripe and one side that has no straps so you can still easily tell say polarity for positive and negative and then for the data line I've just put a little bit of yellow heat shrink on that as well. Of course, there's actually a drawing on the inside of the lid for this box so that if we find ourselves at a Maker Faire and we need to service it we can look at the drawing the schematic on the on the inside of the lid like the documentation goes with the project that's I think that's a nice touch.

And I didn't mention it before but there are a small DC chassis mount socket, just under this mass of white cables here, so this is where the 5-volt power supply can plug into the side of the enclosure and power the project.

And, of course, here is the code for the project so if you've never programmed with a Particle device before, this happens over at build.particle.io so you can follow that link if you have never used particle before and create an account and then it's as easy as copying and pasting the code from this box straight into build.particle.io.

I've already got that open here, so this is what it will look like once you've pasted it into your project environment and if you've paired your particle device with particle dot IO then all you'll have to do is flash the code. If you've never used this kind of interface before if you've never used a particle device before we do have an entire section in our tutorial section dedicated just a Particle. Now of course this is just my take on the infinity mirror table if you follow along with this project and make any improvements to the code for instance with your own features or improving features that I have in there absolutely considered picking up some sweet maker cred and issuing a pull request over at the GitHub repository that'll be really cool to see.

So there you have it the infinity mirror table project now if you're attempting this project yourself and have a few questions or if you need a little guidance absolutely drop us a comment at the bottom of this project page or if you have any other technical questions as well take them over to our forums where full-time makers and we're here to help you with your projects. I'll catch you next time