The Living Mirror Light Display is a clever kinetic “display” that draws by steering reflections rather than emitting pixels — shine sunlight, a spotlight, or even a laser at it and it can “paint” patterns on a nearby surface. Time Sink Studio’s project write-up shows a working 36-tile prototype that’s equal parts optics, mechanics, and embedded control, and it’s a nice reminder that “display tech” doesn’t have to mean LEDs.

How the Living Mirror Light Display Works

Each 50×50 mm mirror tile acts like a 2-axis pixel: tilt/pan changes where its reflected spot lands.

A mirror-matrix prototype with square mirror tiles mounted on a green 3D-printed lattice frame, clamped to a rig in bright sunlight against a brick wall.
A sunlight-driven mirror matrix uses many small steerable tiles to redirect reflections into patterns.


When many tiles move together, those spots combine into low-resolution shapes and animations (persistence of vision does a lot of the heavy lifting). The hard part isn’t moving mirrors — it’s mapping “motor position” to “spot position” reliably, which is why calibration is central to the build.

Building Blocks Behind the Living Mirror Light Display

Mechanically, the tiles use 3D-printed joints and ball-socket linkages driven by small linear stepper actuators. Electrically, the prototype groups tiles into small “islands” and uses DRV8825 stepper drivers plus 74HC595 shift registers to keep direction and sleep control scalable without a wiring nightmare. An ESP32 handles deterministic step generation and networking; the firmware runs under FreeRTOS and communicates over MQTT (if you want an Elektor refresher on ESP32 multitasking, that’s the relevant rabbit hole).

On the software side, there’s a browser-based control UI (Vue/TypeScript) that discovers nodes, configures the grid, and runs camera-based calibration using OpenCV.js to detect spots and build per-mirror correction tables. The code is openly shared (see the firmware repository and the control UI repository), which makes this especially useful as a reference design if you’re thinking about closed-loop calibration, modular motor control, or “mechanical pixels” for art/installations.

Next up, the builder talks about scaling to 64+ tiles and adding interactivity (pose/face tracking and other inputs). If they pull that off cleanly, the Living Mirror Light Display starts to look less like a one-off kinetic sculpture and more like a genuinely reusable platform for reflective projection.

And this is how it looks in action!


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