Infinity Third Eye 🧿

The nine-tail fox is a mythical animal from the East. This spirit possesses magic powers that can disguise themselves as a beautiful man or woman. It sometimes comes with a Third Eye, that looks into the future. This invisible eye links to perception, awareness, and spiritual communication.

As part of my residency at Fuse33 Makerspace learning to do LED art, I made this cool infinity mirror pendant that makes me FEEL MAGICAL.

(See other light-up kitty ears tutorial for the ears portion of this look)

Make this super simple digital charm with these components and steps:

The pendant is something called an "infinity mirror". The infinity mirror is nothing more than a normal mirror, a partial mirror, and LEDs. The LEDs are placed between the mirror and the reflective side of the partial mirror. As the light from the LEDs bounces between the mirrors, some light will pass through the partial mirror each time. You can find commercial products all over the internet, and they have a mesmerizing effect.

Under the guidance of Wizard Shannon, I started by making some different prototypes with cardboard. Since I want to make this into a wearable piece that fits onto my forehead, the overall form factor of the piece needs to be about 5cm ~ ish. The more fancy shapes such as the sailor moon, madame butterfly, and cherry blossom are actually not too suited for housing LEDs, so we went with the basic diamond ♦️ shape.

Transitioning from cardboard prototype to real material, the back piece is a 3mm mirror acrylic, the centerpiece is a 5mm acrylic that houses the LEDs and the front piece is partial mirror acrylic.

The basic circuitry is as follows:

• 5mm LED strip (we counted 6 for our use in this design)
• A controller PCB (that we retrofitted from nLiten's junior controller that has the 3 wire LED output, and power input)
• A power source (portable battery)

The nLiten junior controller comes like this:

After stripping off the wrapping and exposing the PCB, we can then desolder the wire

The point is that we then re-connect via these super thin silver wires to connect to the LED strip.

Make sure GND to GND 😎🤟

After testing we do LIGHT UP functionally, make sure to properly heat-shrink and protect the electronics and solder joints.

Lastly, cut out the real housing mirror acrylic materials (with laser cutter)

Notes:

1) Before laser cutting, apply adhesive to both sides of the centerpiece clear acrylic to simplify assembly later.

2) If sourcing these mirror/partial mirror acrylic is not feasible, consider using a mirror coating as an alternative method.

Add LED into the centerpiece - TADA!

Check out the effect here in the video!

Unleash your third eye magic through DIY LED art!