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Progress: 1st Iteration - Hardware Build

A project log for Reflectrum - Smart Mirror

A new smart mirror design.

chris-gervangChris Gervang 04/11/2016 at 06:540 Comments

I soon settled on a electronics enclosure design made of laser cut acrylic. Here I'm figuring out how I'll fit all of the components together on a single sheet; marking the frame clearance (purple ink). It's designed to fit a Raspberry Pi B and A at this point because I may use either in the end.

I made the back plate and the first frame layer first. Mechanical drawings for these are in github.

At this point the frame has a modular design so that I can mess with how wires come into the mirror. Here I'm testing clearances of an acrylic snap-fit design.

Laser cutting a bunch of border pieces.

It takes 5 layers of 1/8" acrylic to clear the top of the components inside.

All together, it's about as heavy as a Macbook Pro Retina.


I got a good amount of footage of how the heat set inserts are used to screw the electronics onto the mirror, and you'll see that I didn't rely on CAD drawings for everything. A sharpie was good enough to play with different layouts.

Jump forward to Christmas Eve when I put it all together for the first time!

The mirror lives! It's battery powered - no wires no worries.


After all the electronics were in working order I built the enclosure and sealed the mirror for delivery.

Meanwhile, the plot thickens as Michelle collects clues closer to Christmas...

It might have a scroll wheel, a keyboard, is something she can view, has a raspberry pi in it, and she'll see pretty things when she looks at it...

Can you guess what it might be?!


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