It takes balls to learn how to juggle, but once you do you’re quickly moving on to rings, chainsaws, and those very strange juggling clubs. For their Hackaday Prize entry, [Laurent B] and [michael.creusy] are bringing the Internet of Things to juggling clubs. Their Rastello Club is a glowing, LED illuminated juggling prop with a 9-DOF IMU that makes juggling look even cooler than it already is.
Because there is a market for everything, glowing, programmable juggling clubs already exist. These clubs have a few limitations, though. They don’t have nine-axis orientation sensors, there is no communication to a computer or between individual clubs, and of course they’re not Open Source. The Rastello Club fixes these problems, makes programmable juggling clubs easy to use, and adds a bunch of visualizations.
Inside these juggling clubs are a bunch of LEDs, of course, along with a rather powerful STM32F4 ARM processor, the 9-axis IMU, and the circuitry to charge a battery. The radio connection between individual clubs and a computer will be handled with an RFM75 transceiver. No, it’s not WiFi, Bluetooth, or ZigBee; this radio module is faster than Bluetooth, cheaper than Zigbee, and lower power than an ESP8266.
so .. is there some Persistence-Of-Vision thing going on with these or what ?
It will be a little easier to fool the eyes with the diffuse shell, but WS281x chip sets are notoriously bad for POV applications, in my experience!
I agree. We tried to use some to make a POV bike wheel for one project, and they *almost* worked. However, due to timing variability, a few pixels were always in just slightly the wrong place. It was enough to really ruin the effect. We ended up using an LED driver and separate LEDs instead: https://hackaday.io/project/6470-multi-sensor-pov-light
Yes, I agree too with you, POV is not the first goal and WS2812 aren’t the best suited for this. I also tested LPD8806
but I finally kept ws2812 ( best color range 0-255, lower minimum voltage, cheap and easy to find).
The ultimate trick with these would be to have several jugglers tossing many of them back and forth, while displaying a low resolution video clip on the club cloud. ;)
But before that, how about a truly full motion Larson Scanner effect?
Add reaction wheels so I can juggle with negative hand-eye coordination!