Collaborate Disseminate
Senior college projects are the culmination of years of theoretical learning finally put into practice. For many students they are their first experience of doing some proper, real world engineering. [Melangeaddict] chose to take on a persistence of vision display for his final project, and learned plenty along the way. …read more
Continue reading College Project Nets 360 Degree POV Display
Persistance of vision is a fun feature of the human visual system, which allows us to blink a bunch of spinning LEDs at the right time to spell out messages that appear to hang in the air. [TN_Inventor] took a stab at his own POV build, using an old desk …read more
By taking advantage of persistence in human vision, we can use modest bits of hardware to create an illusion of a far larger display. We’ve featured many POV projects here, but they are almost always an exploration in two dimensions. [Jamal-Ra-Davis] extends that into the third dimension with his Volumetric …read more
Continue reading A Multi-Layered Spin On Persistence Of Vision
Many hackers have experimented with the persistence of vision effect. Whip around a bunch of LEDs, flash them at just the right times, and it’s possible to make images to appear to hang in the air. There’s plenty of ways to do this, whether by manually shaking the LEDs by …read more
Continue reading FlexLED Is A Unique Take On Persistence of Vision
[Bithead] wanted to make a prop replica of an Electrostaff from Star Wars, but wasn’t sure how best to create the “crackling arcs of energy” effect at the business ends. After a few false starts, he decided to leverage the persistence of vision effect by spinning LEDs in more than …read more
Continue reading Star Wars Electrostaff Effect, Done With Spinning LEDs
Thursday was my final day in Shanghai. After spending all of Wednesday at Electronica Asia, I headed over to the Espressif Headquarters which is just one subway stop away. This is of course the company behind the well-known ESP8266 and its younger sibling, the ESP32. My host was Ivan Grotkothov, …read more
Continue reading Hacker Abroad: Visiting Espressif and Surprising Subway Ads
A couple years ago I got into making electronic conferences badges by building a device for DEFCON 25 shaped like a dragonfly. Like all badges the most important design factor was quite literally how flashy it was, and two years ago I delivered on that with ten RGB LEDs. At the time I planned to hand-assemble each and every of the 105 badges at my kitchen table. Given those constraints, and a desire for electrical and programmatic simplicity, I landed on using APA102s (DotStar’s in Adafruit parlance) in the common 5050 sized package. They were easy to place, easy to …read more
After this Spring’s Bay Area Maker Faire closed down for Saturday night and kicked everybody out, the fun moved on to O’Neill’s Irish Pub where Hackaday and Tindie held our fifth annual meetup for fellow Maker Faire attendees. How do we find like-minded hackers in a crowded bar? It’s easy: look for tables lit by LEDs and say hello. It was impossible to see everything people had brought, but here are a few interesting samples.
The team from Misty Robotics brought their namesake product to the meetup and carried Misty when there wasn’t enough room to let the robot run. …read more
Continue reading After The Sun Set On San Mateo, LED Takes Over Hackaday’s BAMF Meetup
Death Stars were destroyed twice in the Star Wars movies and yet one still lives on in this 168 LED persistence of vision globe made by an MEng group at the University of Leeds in the UK. While Death Stars are in high demand, they mounted it on an axis tilted 23.4° (the same as the Earth) so that they can show the Earth overlaid with weather information, the ISS position, or a world clock.
More details are available on their system overview page but briefly: rotating inside and mounted on the axis is a Raspberry Pi sending either video …read more
Everyone knows you can’t visibly bend light over short distances in free air. Or can you? [Jack Pearse] has figured out a way to do it though, or at least make it appear that way. He does it by combining a trick of math and a trick of the eye. The secret is the hyperboloid, a geometric construct described by a quadratic equation. [Jack’s] creation is more specifically a hyperboloid in one sheet. This type of structure allows straight lines to create a an overall curved surface. Hyperboloids have been used by architects and in construction for years, often in …read more
