[Hazard] wanted a full color POV display for his bike wheel. Adafruit’s SpokePOV is single color and Monkeylectric’s original version didn’t display images. He also balked at the cost and decided to manufacture his own version. It uses 16 RGB LEDs on a single layer board he manufactured himself. It’s an entirely through-hole design to make assembly easy. It uses a hall effect sensor to synchronize the image display. The two main components are an ATmega328p microcontroller, which should make it Arduino compatible, and a TLC5940 PWM LED driver. It’s a very well documented build and certainly a good looking effect.

[via adafruit]

We’d never discount the beauty that is the SpokePOV bike wheel kits, but if you want to just turn your bicycle into a blinding blur, [depotdevoid] has the solution for you. He had a CCFL tube left over from an abandoned LCD monitor backlight repair, and decided to see what it would look like as a wheel light. The result turned out fairly well. He had to figure out how to mount the 8 batteries plus step-up board. He says the extra weight isn’t really noticeable and the light output is quite bright. CCFLs can be incredibly fragile, so take care when you do the actual mounting.

[Rory Hyde] and [Scott Mitchell] are exploring several projects that add more information to public spaces. The first is the Spoke-o-dometer a persistence of vision device that can display bicycle speed and distance traveled. To develop the device, they first bought a few POV kits to test out. They decided to build their version using an Arduino. Once they had the display proof of concept working, they added a hall effect sensor like the SpokePOV so they could determine speed and orient the display. Check out their project site for plenty of example code and development details.

[via ladyada]