This week, I focused on purchasing materials and making the necessary parts for my project. Throughout the whole week, I was printing the edge supports for the mirror. Eventually, I caved in a bought acrylic from the makerspace. I was able to laser cut al the pieces in less than an hour. Unlike what I was expecting, the one-way mirror film actually went on much easier than anticipated. I got a rubber squeegee to help flatten out the film and they actually came out really good. However, after the first test fit i realized that every edge piece was too small. After 38 hours of constant 3D printing, I was able to start building the frame for the mirror.
Due to the design of the mirror, I also had to design an end cap for each vertex. I did a test print and It actually came out really well. I still need to do a test print for the internal end cap and buy hardware for bolting them together. I’m hoping that the caps will help hold the whole frame together. I will need 12 of each. Since I ran out of black filament, I will also have to print them in grey.
This week, I also started to test the LED lights and the code needed to use them using a *highly* technical setup. At first, I wasn’t happy with the delay needed for lighting up the whole strip. I would take 2-3 seconds for the lights at the end of the strip to turn on. However, I found the Fast LED Arduino library which solved many of my problems. For my starting code, I split the strip up into 30 segments, each being 10 LEDs long. Then, I set every other LED to be red/blue.
Ideally, I want to wire the mirror such that every edge is in series with no edge having to be double backed or wired twice. However this isn’t possible with an icosahedron. Due to this, I think I’ll be able to get 25/30 edges wired in series with the remaining 5 sections branching off and being wired in parallel. I need to install the end caps before I can put the strips into the cube, so I’ll have a couple more days to figure out which edges will be in parallel.
Overall, I’m really happy with how its coming out.
