Category Archives: POV

POV Tops Hobbyist Abilities

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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

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Lighting Up The Night Sky With A Flying POV Display

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We’ve seen loads of persistence of vision displays before, but this sky-writing POV display seems as though it may be a first. And we have to agree with its creators that it’s pretty cool.

The idea man on this was [Ivan Miranda], who conceived of a flying POV as a twist on his robotic dot-matrix beach printer. But without any experience in RC flight, he turned to fellow YouTuber [Tom Stanton], whose recent aerial builds include this air-powered plane, for a collaboration. [Ivan]’s original concept was a long strip of Neopixels that would be attached to the underside of a …read more

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Christmas POV Display Makes Viewer do the Work

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Hackaday readers have certainly seen more than a few persistence of vision (POV) displays at this point, which usually take the form of a spinning LED array which needs to run up to a certain speed before the message becomes visible. The idea is that the LEDs rapidly blink out a part of the overall image, and when they get spinning fast enough your brain stitches the image together into something legible. It’s a fairly simple effect to pull off, but can look pretty neat if well executed.

But [Andy Doswell] has recently taken an interesting alternate approach to this …read more

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A Neat Pen POV build

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We’ve seen a lot of persistence of vision (POV) builds on bike wheels, sticks, and many other holders, but this one puts it on something new: a pen. [Befinitiv] was looking for a new way to add some smarts to everyday devices, and the result is a neat POV display that fits over a pen. At 128 by 64 pixels, it is not high definition, but this build uses a number of interesting techniques.

[Befinitiv] decided to try an alternative way of creating the display. Rather than mounting the LEDs on the outside to shine directly out, this prototype uses …read more

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FPGA Persistently Rick Rolls You

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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

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Spellcasting Gun Uses POV Display, Not Magic

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Persistance of Vision, or POV, displays are ever popular around these parts. Spin a few LEDs and you can make images appear in almost-thin air – just don’t stick your finger in the way. [FriskP] found a great application for this hardware – creating an anime-styled spellcasting gun.

The basic gun is built around a Nerf blaster, which is common in a lot of this type of steampunk and anime build. A Phantom3D POV display is then bolted on to the front along with some 3D printed components for style. The ensemble is then painted in a suitably awesome fashion. …read more

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A Nicely Crafted POV Lightsaber

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We need to have a talk. As tough a pill as it is to swallow, we have to face that fact that some of the technology promised to us by Hollywood writers and prop makers just isn’t going to come true. We’re never going to have a flux capacitor, actual hoverboards aren’t a real thing, and nobody is going to have sword fights with laser beams.

But just because we can’t have real versions of these devices doesn’t mean we can’t make our own prop versions with a few value-added features, like this cool persistence-of-vision lightsaber. [Luni], better known around …read more

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Lucky Cat POV Display Ditches the Waving and Windmills Out of Control

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If you’ve been in a Japanese restaurant, you’ve probably seen a maneki-neko, the lucky cat charm, where a cat welcomes you with a beckoning arm. It’s considered to bring good luck, but we’re not sure if [Martin Fitzpatrick] is pushing his luck with this Lucky Cat POV display. He hacked one of the figurines so the arm forms a persistence of vision (POV) display, where blinking LEDs on the paw create a dot-matrix style display.

Inside the hapless neko is a Wemos D1, motor driver, and a few other components that turn the cat into a working display. The five …read more

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Building a POV Display On A PC Fan

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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

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Pavement Projection Provides Better Bicycle Visibility at Night

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Few would question the health benefits of ditching the car in favor of a bicycle ride to work — it’s good for the body, and it can be a refreshing relief from rat race commuting. But it’s not without its perils, especially when one works late and returns after dark. Most car versus bicycle accidents occur in the early evening, and most are attributed to drivers just not seeing cyclists in the waning light of day.

To decrease his odds of becoming a statistics and increase his time on two wheels, [Dave Schneider] decided to build a better bike light. …read more

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