A custom built vanity mirror that detects the amount of light in the room based on current brightness from various factors (sunlight through a window, other lights in the room that are on), and also detects motion when the user walks in front of it in order to be able to turn on its bulbs to the appropriate brightness.
Detecting the amount of light in the room will turn on different amounts of light LED’s surrounding the mirror, meaning that the mirror will turn on all of the lights and give the user full brightness if the room is dark, such as later in the evening, or turn on only some of the lights to give the user only some brightening if there is already some light in the room. The mirror will turn on no lights if it detects that there is ample light already in the room. A photoresistor is the type of sensor that will allow us to read this. We used certain concepts, including but not limited to: working with photoresistors and understanding the functionality of sensors, and programming the MCP3008 8-channel 10 bit ADC chip. We utilized the GPIO library with a motion sensor that detects when the user approaches. It simply will return to an integer value of 0 or 1 depending on if it detects motion or not, which we can use as a boolean for our program to turn on the mirror or not. Once the user leaves the front proximity of the mirror, it will turn off after about 2.5 seconds of not detecting motion.