Collaborate Disseminate
Chinese Youtuber [corebb] presents the second version of his POV display. The earlier version used 5050-sized SMT addressable LEDs, which didn’t give great resolution, so he rev’d the design to use …read more Continue reading Tidy POV Display Using The ESP32
Persistence of Vision (POV) is a curious part of the human visual system. It’s the effect by which the perception of an image lingers after light has stopped entering the eye. It’s why a spinning propeller appears as a disc, and why a burning sparkler appears to leave a trail …read more
Continue reading The Basics of Persistence of Vision Projects
Sometimes a beautiful project is worth writing on that merit alone, but when it functions as designed,someone takes the time to create a thorough and beautiful landing page for their project, we get weak in the knees. We feel the need to grab the internet and point our finger for everyone to see. This is one of those projects that checks all our boxes. [Nathan Petersen] made a POV toy top called Razzler, jumping through every prototyping hoop along the way. The documentation he kept is what captured our hearts.
The project is a spinning top with an integrated persistence-of-vision …read more
When [Im-pro] wants a display, he wants it to spin. So he built a persistence of vision (POV) display capable of showing a 12-bit color image of 131 x 131 pixels at 16 frames per second. You can see a video about the project below, but don’t worry, you can view it on your normal monitor.
The project starts with a Java-based screen capture on a PC. Data goes to the display wirelessly to an ESP8266. However, the actual display drive is done by an FPGA that drives the motor, reads a hall effect index sensor, and lights the LEDs. …read more
We’ve covered plenty of persistence of vision (POV) displays before, but this one from [Vadim] is rather fun: it’s built on top of a PC fan. He’s participating in a robot building competition soon and wanted to have a POV display. So, why not kill two birds with one stone and build the display onto a fan that could also be used for ventilation?
The display is a stand-alone module that includes a battery, Neopixels, Arduino and an NRF240L01 radio that receives the images to be displayed. That might seem like overkill, but putting the whole thing on a platform …read more
Like many of us, [Gustav Evertsson] was looking for an excuse to set stuff on fire and spin it around really fast to see what would happen. Luckily for him (and us) the Winter Olympics have started, which ended up being the perfect guise for this particular experiment. With some motors from eBay and some flaming steel wool, he created a particularly terrifying version of the Olympic’s iconic linked rings logo. Even if you won’t be tuning in for the commercials Winter Games, you should at least set aside 6 minutes to watch this build video.
The beginning of the …read more
Continue reading Celebrating the Olympics With Flaming Windmills
We’ve been frankly mystified at the popularity of fidget spinners. After all, we can flip an ink pen around just fine. However, [MakersBox] just sold us on what he calls the geek spinner. The fact that the spinner is actually a PCB and has parts on it, would probably have been cool enough. However, the spinner also has a persistence of vision LED set up and can display 12 characters of text as it spins. Because the board is simple and uses through hole components, it would be a great project for a budding young hacker. You can see a …read more
3 hackers, 16 LEDs, 15 years of development, one goal: A persistence of vision display stick that fits into your pocket. That’s the magicShifter 3000. When waved, the little, 10 cm (4 inches) long handheld device draws stable images in midair using the persistence of vision effect. Now, the project has reached another milestone: production.
The design has evolved since it started with a green LED bargraph around 2002. The current version features 16 APA102 (aka DotStar) RGB LEDs, an ESP-12E WiFi module, an NXP accelerometer/magnetometer, the mandatory Silabs USB interface, as well as a LiPo battery and charger with …read more
Continue reading magicShifter 3000: An Over-Engineered POV Stick with a 15-Year Journey
