More Minipovs!: An Inexpensive Persistence Of Vision Toy

more minipovs!: an inexpensive persistence of vision toy

hey, if you’re working on a cool hack let us know, here’s one that just came in. “neo2” sent this–“just built one of these (on a breadboard for now), and it is as fun to play with as it looks. as for the question of how to program it, you need a pic programmer. i got mine off ebay for about $20. pictures of orignal program and my change to say “matt” here.

11 thoughts on “More Minipovs!: An Inexpensive Persistence Of Vision Toy

  1. Hey, both links go to the same place (a bunch of pictures) with no information on how to build… is that a mistake?

    I’d love to build one of these, but don’t know the first thing about programming ICs.

  2. Hello,

    Not to diss the author, its great, but wouldnt it be better if it turned its self (with a motor) and could be connected to the pc and read email or other messages (like “hack a day” posts)?

  3. I’m tempted to put in my own POV toy. It is 12 LEDs tall and does RGB in 4096 colors. Yup. RGB LEDs. Pulse width modulation (for intensity) is done via two MAXIM 6956 chips (with easy expandability for more). The MAXIM chips use the I2C protocol for communication with the CPU.

    The CPU itself is a Scexi SX28A running at 75mhz. I’d type more about it, but I started this at 10am and now it is 4pm. Too much work today. I’ll stop here.

  4. and whoever made it was also nice enough to scrape the labeling of the IC ensuring no one would be able to understand how it as made, theres no real way for us to tell weather or not the device was used to produce those results and that it wasn’t something else. Also a breadboard is awfuly inconvienient for a rave.

  5. 12 LEDs tall? And in color? Wow! That’s something I’d like to see. Probably couldn’t build it tho… Not with out alot of help
    But you really should post it, I’d /love/ to see it!
    That’s impresive enough to mount on a car to tell off the other drivers with or to build to show tickers or read off rss feeds or computer stats ontop of your computer…
    Wow.

  6. i recall reading somewhere that some guy was offering POV displays for bicycle spokes at 40$ a pop. To make them really say anything cool though, you needed to buy like 4 (I think you could have up to like 8 per wheel)

    4 x 2 wheels x 40$ = a fuck of a lot of money for an otherwise cool idea.

    But with your plans, and maybe some effort into compacting it, i’d be really interested in making one for myself.

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