We’ve covered plenty of persistence of vision (POV) displays before, but this one from [Vadim] is rather fun: it’s built on top of a PC fan. He’s participating in a robot building competition soon and wanted to have a POV display. So, why not kill two birds with one stone and build the display onto a fan that could also be used for ventilation?
The display is a stand-alone module that includes a battery, Neopixels, Arduino and an NRF240L01 radio that receives the images to be displayed. That might seem like overkill, but putting the whole thing on a platform that rotates does get around the common issue of powering and sending signals to a rotating display: there is no need for slip connections.
[Vadim] goes into a good level of detail on how he built the display, including the problems he had diagnosing a faulty LED chip, and why it is important to test at each stage as it is easier to debug when the display isn’t whizzing around at high speed.
It’s a bit of a rough build that uses more protoboard than might be necessary, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed that it doesn’t fly off during the competition.
I like it when I click on a video link and find it is only around 2 minutes and not 29 minutes long!
Would have been persistence of video…
“We’ve covered plenty of persistence of vision (POV) displays before, but this one from [Vadim] is rather fun: it’s built on top of a PC fan. ”
Wonder if anyone’s done a POV display off a car tire?
I’ve seen some company making SUV wheels with that back in the days when “pimp my ride” was still clinging to relevancy.
POV wheels, only $12K (posted by former HaD boss Phillip Torrone):
https://makezine.com/2006/03/25/led-pov-wheels-for-your-c/
I’ve seen a number of them that go on a bike wheel.
http://www.instructables.com/id/SpokePOV%3A-LED-Bike-Wheel-Images/
Or SpokePOV for bikes:
http://www.ladyada.net/make/spokepov/
Ninja’d by gregkennedy!
Sometimes I see comments show up before mine hours after I’ve made one. Either I’m on the “Check for Questionable Content” list, or more likely, it has something to do with time zones or individual clock settings.
Twilight Zone.
The clicking as it spun made me think it would be interesting to see a hackaday article on self balancing mechanisms. I’ve seen a basic description involving a ring with 3 ball bearings or partly filled with fluid. I haven’t seen any diy projects using them and wonder why.
Great… You use POV for ‘persistance of vision’ while I know it as ‘point of view’. So when reading the headline I was wondering how that was supposed to work.
That’s because your Point of View is different than HaD’s!
In the Army, POV meant Privately Owned Vehicle (I think) as opposed a military vehicle.
IMHO you should add struts to the top of the light strip and the top of the battery as well as balance it like one would balance a car tire.
I had to do it eventually, because the strip of acrylic kept bending outwards while it was spinning. Thanks for the tip!
I thought “persistence of vision” devices were meant to “display” something – I cannot see anything displayed in the video except for blinking LEDs? Somehow I missed a point along the way, probably.
Well, it does display something – namely numbers, but my camera’s framerate isn’t right to capture that. What’s displayed is visible with the naked eye, believe me.