My friend Wheat-Thin built a box for this version.

Wheat-Thin's box

I painted it white and taped six strands of 10 LEDs each to it.

Front of Mirror with LEDs

The signal and ground wires are soldered to the top of each strand, and 5v and ground to the bottom of each strip. The wiring is pretty simple.

Mirror wiringThe signal and ground wires from each strip go to the Fadecandy (FC, the board in the upper right on the white pad). I made a 6×2 wiring harness with female headers, and put an 8×2 male header on the FC for the connection. Power is supplied by the 8.4v NiCd batter on the bottom. All the grounds go to the ground bus on the black pad on the right.

Ground busThe bus is a piece of 1/2″ copper pipe smooshed flat with wires soldered to it. The pipe is secured to the box with 10 lbs double-sided tape on top of electrical tape which is on top of duct tape (electrical tape sticks to duct tape but not to wood; the duct tape sticks to wood).

Power runs up the left to an on/off switch, then to a 7A voltage regulator (on the white pad, center left). A voltage monitor is attached to the regulator’s Vin headers to keep track of the battery’s power. 5v comes out of the regulator to the power bus (on the red pad). The 5v and ground wires from the LED strands are attached to the buses. It kind of works.

A couple of notes: the diffuser is just a sheet of grocery bag HDPE I’ve taped over the LEDs. I’ve set the LEDs to use a max of 50% of their power, and they’re still much too bright.

Lots remains to be done: the camera needs to be attached, configured, and understood; the Raspberry Pi needs to be mounted and powered from the battery (not simple, needs another board); the software needs to do something comprehensible (maybe I can figure out the python stuff?); and we need to come up with a better diffuser than this piece of plastic.

However, lots has been accomplished. I’ve figured out to make buses out of copper (and that will handle the load) for the production version. I’m starting to get a better sense of what the diffusion needs to do. I understand a little more about the Fadecandy server configuration (the explanation at Adafruit is the best).