Inspirations:

Almost a year ago late at night i watched a video on YouTube made by Ideal Idea. In his video he created an icosahedron which is a 20 sided shape infinity box made out of acrylic. He began by laser cutting each side and carefully glued each side together. Before glueing every piece together he set two-way film onto each piece. With the box finally built he began to design corner caps to hold LED strips and covers for these caps. he designed the covers to be be fastened with a screw to be able to get into the LED’s if something were to happen. With these steps finished he started to create his terrarium. finally he coded the LED’s to be a bright white and he added some accents to the box to make it seem minimalistic. His designed looked very sleek and you could tell that he knew what he was doing and what his final goal was. His video inspired me to do something similar to it as I have never seen something like it before, and if you google “Infinity box terrarium” his idea is the only one that appears.

Vision:

Before starting this project i knew i did not want to make the same project i mentioned above. I wanted to build something a bit different but also keep some key components. I wanted to build a more ergonomic shape and make it smaller so it could easily fit anywhere in my room. Before starting on the project I set five specifications, which where:

1. Have a natural feel
2. Two-way mirror effect must work
3. LED’s must work in unison
4. The latch must be able to open and close without need of an outside force
5. final result must be safe to keep plants alive

I set these five specifications as a base line to show me that my final result was achieved. These specs seemed very achievable at the beginning of this project, but as i worked on it i saw that number 4 was not going to be achievable in the time frame i had and the size constraint i mentioned above. I was not able to complete this specification because i would of not finished my project in time because i would have to buy servos and a LCD screen and wait for them to be delivered, I would also have to spend a lot more time making code to control all these extra components. I also knew that i did not want to use an LED strip because it would be to bulky so i bought addressable LED’s. Maybe in the future ill redo this project and make it big enough to incorporate these things.

Design Plans:

These were my initial sketches of what i wanted my project to look like with these sketches I was able to create the CAD for it to be able to create the .DXF files to get the shapes laser cut.

CAD of different components

With the cad ready i was able to laser cut the shapes and 3D print the LED holders and start building the box.