POV pong

posted Apr 13th 2009 1:25pm by Caleb Kraft
filed under: led hacks, video hacks

[Akeeh] posted something to our flickr pool that caught our eye. The image was a rotating POV display, playing pong. We followed through the links and found this very well done rotating pov display. The construction is quite nice, showing multiple colors and smooth motion. there’s a little bit of wiggle even though it has a custom round pcb. Maybe a little better counter weight would help with that. The idea isn’t new, but it is good looking and elegantly made.

Comments [7]

tagged: persistence of vision, pong, POV, rotating

Reader Comments

Pretty cool, but the video doesn’t show the thing actually playing pong.

Posted at 2:20 pm on Apr 13th, 2009 by BigBubbaX

Grafting an Atari controller onto the set would definitely up the geek factor.

Posted at 2:21 pm on Apr 13th, 2009 by BigBubbaX

I suspect the wiggle is because it’s dynamically unbalanced. Even though there’s a counterweight, the LED stack is taller than the counterweight, so it has a longer lever arm. It probably appears balanced as a static assembly, but when it spins it will still be unbalanced.

Posted at 2:46 pm on Apr 13th, 2009 by Orv

I’m noticing a lack of pong in the video. It looks like a good display though.

Posted at 4:29 pm on Apr 13th, 2009 by Fox3

Nice.. I was expecting to see “pong” there too :)

When I first received my arduino, I also did a simple POV in a couple of hours just for the sake of testing it.

http://www.miknix.homelinux.com/arduino/pov_display/rev2/

Despite the fact it is being constructed with legos (lame) and stuff, it actually works very well :)
It uses a IR led + sensor to sync with the rotation speed.

Anyway.. I thought it was worth to share.
Greetings all.

Posted at 5:03 pm on Apr 13th, 2009 by miknix

Hello,

The video on the post is the first video of the device from last year so it’s a bit old and balancing wasn’t so good back then.

I uploaded a new video showing all the current features, including the Pong:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQyC17rSbDs

And here is a video of the drawing program I made for it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfWWW_XBn-E

There is an ATtiny2313 in the base for the buttons and controllers and two connectors for the Pong controllers and one 9-pin joystick port for C64/etc joysticks.

The 2313 sends the button press commands to the ATmega8 on the rotating part via infrared link. Also the RS232 line is connected to the same and all the same commands can be sent from a computer too.

Posted at 2:33 am on Apr 14th, 2009 by Aki Korhonen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQyC17rSbDs

Video showing the Pong action.

Posted at 4:08 am on Apr 14th, 2009 by Rich