For this project we were given Seeed rp20240 Xiaos, I wanted to be able to control the mirror through wifi, so i decided to use the much more limited brother of the esp32 that I use in my personal projects, the esp8266. It "features" 1/4 the storage of the seeed, and takes up a bit smaller space but its main point for me is its ability to communicate through wifi
I then decided to switch to a self made board as it has a mix of the benefits of the esp and the seeed. The board uses a much more powerful esp8266 chip, the esp32-c3, and the board I made also has a 5v input and a voltage regulator so i can run off 5v. It still has wifi support so it will be able to be controlled over wifi.
This is my design for the board I made, which uses a ESP32C3-Wroom module as the main componet and has pinout for i2c output and usb input, aswell as a different voltage regulator board into REG, and a RC delay circuit to let the board actually boot
After hooking up the neopixel wires to: the 5v wire went into the same place as the voltage regulator, at the 5 volt input. the datapin went into one of the 2 GPIOs in the i2c output, and the ground went into the GND pin in the i2c output.
After we prepared the neopixels and board, our next step was to prepare the frame, and then finally cut the acrylic
first we cut the wood to the right length, the prepare it for the cuts we would do to make it have the angles and grooves.
we then cut 45 degree angles into it, so that if we rotated the wood pieces that we cut it would fit into a 90 degree angle, allowing us to make a square
We then cut channels into the wood, with the video on the left showing us cutting the channel for the neopixel, while on the right we cut small grooves for the acylic sheets that would act as our mirrors.
We then drilled in a hole for the neopixels to go through, and cut out the back acrylic sheets that we would put a mirrored vinyl on.
After that we applied the half reflective vinyl to the clear acrylic sheet to allow for the mirror to seemingly be endless, and my first attempt is on the left while my second much better attempt is on the right.
At the same time as doing that, we also glued 3 of our 4 pieces together to form a U shape, to get the wood ready and make it easier for ourself's later on.
I Started putting it together by checking if my acrylic pieces fit, which they did not. This is the major problem i encountered during this unit, as i had to physically rip apart my wood to let me reglue it and fix the angle problem. Thanks to Georgia's working arm and hot glue, I rushed through and fixed it quickly. After fixing it I used the adhesive backing of the neopixel to stick it into the channel i made for it, and then used hotglue to guarantee its efficacy.
I then put in the back(left) full mirror that was tinted blue, and the front(right) half mirror to allow for the infinity effect
fully assembled but off, it looked like the left, and when turned on with different colors it looked like the other two. It had the effect in the middle where it seemed the colors changed was due to the blue mirror mixing with the yellow to form green, and if i had used red it would of formed purple.
Further steps:
I attempted after getting done to add wifi, but there is a pin on the board that i had to short to ground to get it into boot mode since I forgot that when I designed the board, and I don't want to go back and redesign the board so I could of added wifi and have some of the code required for adding wifi, but am not bothering to.