Heya,
So I have a Blinky POV and I’ve been trying to use it to get a better understanding of how POV works, but I’m not making much progress. i was wondering, if i designed my own PCB to do it, how hard it would be to add “pixels” (LEDs)? Same question goes for changing the orientation one is meant to move the device from left to right to left to a circular swing, as if it were mounted to a tire spoke (not my plan, swing will be much slower I think)? Thanks in advance.
Hello, welcome to the W&L forums!
The main constraint on adding more LED pixels would be the number of GPIO pins are available on the microcontroller chip. You could certainly get a different chip with more GPIO pins. That would require some changes to the firmware that runs on the chip, to support more LEDs. At its core, a POV effect like this is “only” setting the GPIO output pins to the desired values, over and over again, with the right time interval between pin updates.
I believe the current POV implementation would work great on a tire spoke, but might require tweaking the timing of your stored message so that the playback speed is compatible with the tire rotation speed.