DIY Altoids Infinity Mirror

I've never made an infinity mirror before, much less owned one, and thought it was much more complex than it actually was. So during the Deconstruction 2014 (a global hackathon-ish sort of thing), one of our projects became this altoids infinity mirror!

What you need:

• Altoids Tin
• Mirror that can fit into altoids tin (you may need to cut your own)
• 1 way mirror (we used a filter from an old projector)
• LEDs or Chibitronics LED stickers
• Electrical Tape + Double-sided Tape
• 5v power supply (wall wart) with its power jack cut off

Tools you may need:

• Mouse Sander
• Dremel tool w/metal cutting wheel
• Tin Snips
• Drill Press
• Files/steel wool

For the mirror, we used a glass cutter to score it.

• We clamped the glass down and using fairly significant pressure, scored the mirror.
• We then used the back of the glass cutter (what looked like a ball) to gently tap the mirror. It split fairly easily!

Note, when cutting it, make sure to allow enough space on the sides of the mirror for your lid to close!

• Apply a piece of double-sided tape inside of the altoids cover and tape in the mirror.
• We decided to put the mirror on the Altoid side so that we could still keep the Altoid graphic

• Using a mouse sander we sanded off the nutrition facts for a nice silver-y surface. We also sanded it with some 000 steel wool to get a better polish. A lot easier than we thought it'd be!
• We traced the shape of the filter/other mirror on the box and drew box inside of that one with a 1.5mm border.
  • The border is important because that was where we put the super glue to keep the filter in place.

Since the altoids tin is conductive, we used it as the ground plane. But this required that we isolate the positive power rail from ground.

• Put electrical tape around the inside of the tin but below the edge by around 1.5mm - just enough for your LED/chibitronic LED negative leg.
• Put Chibitronic copper tape over the electrical tape, also around the inside of the tin. If you're using Chibitronic LED stickers (as I did), you'll want to make sure the positive leg of the LED can reach the copper tape.

• We used Chibitronic LEDs around the edge. Again the + side of the LED attached to the copper tape and the - side attached to the ground plane of the tin. I believe we used 8 LEDs.
• We then soldered the + side of the wall wart to the copper tape and the - side of the wall wart to the tin.
• We drilled a hole for the wall wart cord to go through, but if you need to give the cord more room, just use a pair of tin snips to adjust it!

And voila! The fun thing about using a projector filter is that depending on which way you turn it, you end up with a different spectrum of colors! Hope you enjoy it!