Wanting to showcase their USB LED strip controller, the folks at Maniacal Labs built a POV LED stick this weekend. Yes, it’s pretty much the same as any other POV LED display you’ve seen; set a camera for a long exposure, wave the POV light stick around, and get a cool pixely image in mid-air. This build is a little different, though: it’s controlled over WiFi with a Raspberry Pi connected to a WiFi network.
The USB LED strip controller in question is the AllPixel, a small board that controls NeoPixels, WS2801, LDP8806, and a bunch of other LED strip controllers over USB. The Stick used for this project consisted of two meters of LPD8806 LEDs, giving 96 pixels of horizontal resolution. A big battery and Raspberry Pi rounds out the rest of the electronics.
Building a LED POV display isn’t that much different from building a LED matrix display; all you have to do is break up the image into individual columns and display them sequentially. To do this, the Maniacal Labs folks whipped up a LEDPOV class that does just that. To get the images, just open the shutter on a camera, wave the stick around, and if you get it right, you’ll have a great pixely image of nyan cat or the rainbow wrencher.