POV Display: In Process
Vivianni suggested that I make a sort of POV display, so I can put an image of a chakram or sais on it so I can win the award for most nerdy person ever *laughs*. POV stands for persistence of vision. This display works by rotating a set of LEDs in a circle and lighting them up at different times to create an image. They are a popular creation for hobby electronics.
I currently have no way to receive parcels, so I thought I'd limit myself to only using components/things I have lying around in my room.
I plan to use an Arduino Duemilanove microcontroller to control the display. It's going to be 8-bit RGB. We'll see if that's enough to make a chakram.
Figure 1: The basic schematic
The µC that I'm using doesn't have enough ports for me to control each LED individually, so I'm going to multiplex them by colour. It'll be interesting to see how well stepping through the colours works on a system like this. I guess it all depends upon the speed of the fan. It'll take some tweeking in the software to get it right, methinks.
I'm going to use a computer fan to spin the LEDs and µC. My original thought was to make the LED/µC USB powered, but then I ran into a problem of just how to connect the USB to the spinning platform without death happening. I'll have to ponder this for a while.
I have finished soldering in the LEDs though. My board is kinda small, so I was thinking of connecting it to a ruler, and the ruler to the computer fan and weighting the other side down. That'd also give me more room to put my µC if I am too lazy to actually solder it in.
Figure 2: The display thus far