Jonathan
Jonathan Author of Robopenguins

Infinity Mirror

Infinity mirrors are an optical illusion that gives the impression of a long corridor, by sandwiching some lights between two mirrored surfaces. I’ve been interested in trying to make a project using this affect, and wanted to do a simple test to see if the window tint I found would work. I was able to get a quick proof of concept working with relatively little effort.

image005

I spent a decent chunk of time looking for a suitable frame for the mirror. After searching through thrift and dollar stores I eventually found something better then what I was looking for.

image001

 

This masculine looking thing, was a double sided mirror. By flipping one mirror around and making the other mirror translucent, I could achieve the infinity mirror affect without needing to do any serious construction.

The hardest part of this build was making the smaller mirror translucent. I had bought some window tint planning to make my own translucent mirror out of a normal sheet of glass. I ended up scraping the backing off of the small mirror with steal wool and toothpaste. Once I was left with the glass I applied the tint. This was not a particularly good way to do this. I ended up scratching the glass and it took forever.

Once I had the frame fully set up, I just needed to set up the LEDs. This mirror is static and doesn’t have any fancy color changes, so I just used a bunch of LEDs and resistors connected to a 5V cell phone charger. The mirror had a ring of plastic in it for spacing, so I used that to mount the LEDs.

 

image002 image003 image004

With this done, I just needed to close things up and I had a working infinity mirror.

image011 image010