MiniPOV.

The motivation for this project was born when I saw some led based sign infront of a pharmacy. I was puzzled by how the image in the sign was fixed in mid air. So decided to invistegate how this was done, and found this great diy kit.

I picked up this project to have a bit of practice with soldering and PIC programming. This kit was purchased from Lady Ada's site.

The board is a simple line of 8 leds, that are controlled by the PIC. The PIC has a clock and allows you to blink the leds at a certain frequency. Based on this you can represent a character by say blinking five times in 1 second, giving you a 5x8 led array per second for your text characters. Then if you move the device side to side very quickly and due to Persistence of vision, the text you programmed appears. I highly recomend this kit, it was cheap and great fun to make.

The circuit board even allows you to connect a hall effect sensor, so that you can synchronise your blinking rate to the movement. Some crazy people even mount a similar kit to their bicycle wheels.