In June 2015 I stumbled upon a blogpost by Michael Teeuw, the creator of the original Magic Mirror. He holds a blog at michaelteeuw.nl called Xonay Labs. Admittedly, most of my current website is inspired by his website, but as a starter this was the first project I also decided to attempt. If you haven’t seen it, take a look at his original project and blog, I’m sure that if you like the stuff I’m doing, you’ll love his site!
So, let’s get to the build:
July 2015 – First Build
A magic mirror works by having a screen behind a so called one-way mirror. A one-way mirror reflects a certain percentage of the light that hits it, while it also lets some of it through. This means that if we put a one-way mirror in front of a display and display some white text on a black background, the text will shine through the mirror and shows up between our reflection! Awesome, right?
There are a few things we’re gonna need for this build:
- A Raspberry Pi to run the software (which we again will credit to Michael Teeuw).
- A display to tell us how sexy we look today.
- A one-way mirror.
Also, being a student at the time meant that I wanted to do this project as cheap as possible. So first, I ordered myself some one-way mirror foil on eBay (which was €5,- compared to an actual mirror that costed €200,-). In addition, I bought a Raspberry Pi and an old TV-screen that I picked up using my motorbike:
Being very (over-)confident of myself, I decided that I’d be able to take apart the TV and different layers of the LCD panel, and glue the foil right onto the top layer of the LCD panel. The disassembly went rather well, but after I glued the foil on the display I was rather disappointed with the mirror-effect. Also, after I assembled the TV back together I found that the LCD panel was broken.
Here I found out that this project is going to take some re-work and smaller steps…