Some late night thinking yielded the idea that resulted in this project, which was cut out from cast acrylic, layer by layer, on my one-off, GRBL-controlled CNC machine. An Arduino Pro Mini drives the NeoPixel RGB LED strip with a demo program, or a microphone can be incorporated into the circuit with the flip of a switch, so that the light pattern is altered by ambient sound. It is all powered by an internal Lithium Polymer battery, which is rechargeable via an external mini USB port. All of the electronic bits are available at Sparkfun www.sparkfun.com and the acrylic is readily available from the hobbyist-friendly Tap Plastics www.tapplastics.com. All of the features, holes, and profiles were designed to be milled with a 1/16” carbide endmill. I wanted to keep the outside diameter of the enclosure as small as possible compared to the diameter of the mirror. As a result, I didn’t leave much room for the wiring and it proved to be somewhat challenging to assemble. The fairly loose tolerance on the thickness of the cast acrylic presented some challenges as well, due to the stacked nature of this assembly. However, the end result is exactly what I had hoped for.

Each layer was designed in CamBam, and g-code was produced for CNC fabrication.

Cutting out a layer on my home built CNC router.

All of the components are constrained by geometric features in each layer.

Detail of geometric features that constrain the USB charger. Note the embedded dowel pin used to support the layers that have been cut through.

Assembling the layers.

Neopixel strip and wiring. I masked the lens of each LED and painted the whole strip flat black.

More layer assembly and wiring.

Precisely designed and machined pockets to constrain the power and microphone selector switches.

Power switch and USB charger.

The back side is translucent for a geek peek into the insides.