How to Build an Affordable Infinity Mirror Clock
You can harness the "infinity mirror" effect to build a nice-looking clock and Dushyant Ahuja has a tutorial to show you how.
An “infinity mirror” is a contraption made using at least three components: a mirror, a two-way mirror, and some kind of light. The light is placed between the two mirrors and gets reflected back and forth infinitely. Normally you wouldn’t be able to see that, but the two-way mirror allows some light to escape through one side. The resulting effect looks your light disappearing off into an eventual vanishing point. You can harness that effect to build a nice-looking clock, and Dushyant Ahuja has a tutorial that will walk you through how to do so affordably.
This clock shows the time across a ring of LEDs. Those are individually-addressable RGB LEDs that can be lit up in any color, and those colors can represent the hands of the clock. Because of the infinity effect, a single LED on the perimeter of the LED ring will be reflected back and forth to form a line moving towards the center. A convex mirror will help facilitate that effect. You just need an enclosure to house the mirrors and LEDs, and a way to control those LEDs.
If you follow this tutorial, you’ll use a picture frame for your enclosure. As long as it’s the right size and is deep enough, it will work—though a shadow box might work even better. The LEDs are WS2812b individually-addressable LEDs that come in strips of varying densities. Those will be controlled by a Wemos D1 Mini, or any other ESP8266 board. A 3D-printed mount can help you keep everything tidy inside of the enclosure. Then simply upload the provided code to your ESP8266, configure your connection using the included self-hosted web interface, and you’re ready to go! Dushyant has even included some customization options, so you can change the colors to suit your tastes.
