Planet Arduino

When [Im-pro] wants a display, he wants it to spin.  So he built a persistence of vision (POV) display capable of showing a 12-bit color image of 131 x 131 pixels at 16 frames per second. You can see a video about the project below, but don’t worry, you can view it on your normal monitor.

The project starts with a Java-based screen capture on a PC. Data goes to the display wirelessly to an ESP8266. However, the actual display drive is done by an FPGA that drives the motor, reads a hall effect index sensor, and lights the LEDs.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the project is the FPGA-based mapping of the rectangular coordinates of the incoming video to the polar coordinates required by the display. There are 4 arms of LEDs or “wings” and a 3D printed structure that is all included in the post.

The FPGA is a Cmod S6 which is a breakout board for a Xilinx Spartan 6 with more than enough horsepower to handle the workload. There are also custom PCBs involved, so when you think about it, it is a fairly wide-ranging project. Java software, ESP8266 software, FPGA configurations, a 3D-printed design, and PCB layouts. If you want something simple to tackle that has a bit of everything in it, this might be your next project.

Most of the POV displays we see don’t have this kind of color-depth and resolution. We’ve seen displays built around fans. Our favorite, though, is the dog speedometer.

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.