Minimal depth of a frame for the magic mirror

bhepler

Some users have created fairly thin magic mirrors by using laptop screens and driver boards. The laptop screens are thinner than conventional LCD monitors.

The downside is that you’re limited to the display size of a laptop screen.

uros76

I am planning to go for 2cm depth with the Samsung monitor I took apart. I will need to move monitors mainboard on the side and use angled hdmi cable. Once I receive mirror glass will sum up whole setup.

lavolp3

@stepan I have 6-7 cm depth with shortwired power supply for the monitor and angled hdmi cable.

If you want to go thinner, look for a monitor that has it’s HDMI port in the same plane/direction as the screen. There are some that have this. Mine unfortunately not.

thedoorsfanatic

@stepan mine is framless

retroflex

My brother cut a hole in the wall for the mirror and now it only builds a few millimeters. Looks really nice. See here:

https://www.planet4.se/magic-mirror-deluxe/

Text in Swedish, but you can look at the images.

stepan

Thanks everyone for your answers!

The plan is to have MM placed on a wooden wall. The apartment was refurbished and there is electricity prepared in the wall, so there won’t be any cables hanging. The aim is to reduce the depth of the frame as much as possible so the ‘passage’ from room to room is affected minimally.

wall for the mirror (sorry for the link, the picture upload in this forum just does not work :()

Mulling over on the question, the mirror is going to be quite big - would that mean the ‘glass’ of the mirror itself would need to be more deeper?

@uros76 Can you please explain how difficult is “move monitors mainboard on the side and use angled hdmi cable.” for someone who has almost 0 experience with electronics?

@BKeyport Would you mind to share a link with description how you achieved that?

uros76

@stepan it really depends on monitor. My 24" Samsung S24D330H screen without mainboard is max depth like 17mm. The screen’s mainboard is connected with 3 cables to the screen. One is for screen data, second for screen lighting inverter, and third for touch buttons panel.
Luckily screen data cable is long enough so I can move the mainboard around. The inverter power cable is not long enough for maneuvering but its only few wires so I will just extend those wires to the desired location. The touch panel cable I don’t care about since I won’t be manipulating with buttons at all.
One more good thing about this monitor is the power supply. It uses an external brick-style power supply which gives only 14V to monitor. I guess that’s why they managed to make monitor so thin, no need for internal power supply electronics. Saying that it will make my life easier to just solder on +/- power wires directly on the mainboard.

Anyway, that’s my plan for my first MM. Now I am waiting for the glass mirror to be produced and delivered. Then I plan to summarize complete build.

BKeyport

@stepan I got lucky, I guess. The circuit boards don’t take up so much room, and they’re in a case that’s way too big for them. If I move the boards a bit, I can get it down to the depth of the monitor itself… of course, that’s playing with stuff that’s at line voltage, and you might not not want to do that.