Read the statement by Michael Teeuw here.
1st Mirror,,,
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I normally don’t post, but I have gleaned enough information from this site, I thought I should try to give something back in the hope it can help someone else from my mistakes. I wish I had taken more pictures along the way, but I always do with anything I build. I went with a wood frame large mirror because most of the interior of my home is wood. We all know that two way mirror’s of any size are insanely expensive, so I was hoping to cut some serious cost there, well all in all that was my largest mistake,( pun intended). I went 36x30 to replace my bathroom mirror. I got a 36x30 glass from a local Lowes for $18 and 2 way film from Amazon for $28. Way cheaper then $1200 for 2 way glass. Was hoping, thinking that rigid glass would fix the fun house effect, (which it pretty well did). So I built the large frame for the glass built the containing box for the 32 in tv all the while getting the pi3 set up like I thought I wanted it, turns out that was a mistake too. Got Alexa going on it after 3 days of reading here and trying everything lol. Well I already have 3 Alexa’s in the house and they pick up way better the the usb mic on the pi, lol. At this point I was just glad to be learning a lil bit about writing code:) Very lil bit, lots of copying and pasting. So I realized that maybe Google ( who really answers a lot more questions then Alexa does) might be a better fit. So 4 long days later I gave up on that… just couldn’t get it to work. So I didn’t want to give up on talking to my mirror ( now i look back and I think why was that so important, I’m a 50 yr old man, why do I need to talk to my mirror??? Near as I can figure out…it was just to impress the grandboys lol) So then I moved on to MMM_voice which work very well, unfortunately I just have to much ambient noise. At this point I just figure I should be happy with what I got, and get it together. I’m learning something about coding, changing colors, font sizes, ect, so lets get this thing up. Finish putting it together, get the heavy damn thing hung, thinking yeah this is pretty bad ass!!! Well that joy was short lived when my eyes started bothering me, like when you wake up and your eye’s are matted that’s how they felt. So I just figure I’m tired I’ll try it after i get up… sure enough next day same thing, I have my son in law come over and 5 minutes in his eye’s are doing the same thing. Not exactly sure but it just hard to focus on that 2 way film looking at it from a distance looks awesome, but to brush your teeth or comb your hair just hurts. So old mirror back on the wall, magic mirror demoted to the shop. I’m not giving up on this, I just got to figure out something on the mirror part that don’t cost as much as another level on the tree house. I really like to thank all the incredibly intelligent folks on here for all the help you give to everyone!!
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I wanted to add this in case anyone was going to make their own wood frame.
It’s called a Kreg pocket tool, you can get it at Lowes for $40 it makes your joints and 45’s incredibly strong no nail holes to fill, no marks on your facing wood!!
