The Ice Breaker @ ch00ftech Industries – thanks Mark! ch00f writes -

This is an idea I had a while back after making my persistence of vision toy.  Unlike that though, this thing had to be small and lightweight.  To accomplish this, I was going to need to etch my own PCB rather than using perfboard.  That’s what this was all about.  I’ll be providing a tutorial on that later.

So, unlike the persistence of vision toy, I wanted this thing to have some sense of where it was in order to blink the LEDs properly.  All I needed was a single trigger at a set location.  I could then use the time between triggers to calculate how fast the user is waving the device around and use that frequency to attempt to blink the LEDs at the same location in every cycle.  Image stability makes text much easier to read.

My original thoughts were to use an accelerometer, but that presents several unknowns.  For example, as the user is waving to the right, he or she might actually be slowing down slightly which would register as a leftwards acceleration.  Also, accelerometers are generally fairly expensive, and I was trying to keep costs down.  I decided to consult a similar gadget and do some reverse engineering.

Halloween Projects from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories @ Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

Halloween is one of our favorite holidays, and our collection of Halloween projects continues to grow. Every fall we update it to include our latest projects for the season. We’ve categorized it by costumes, pumpkins, decor and food. If you’re inspired by one of these projects to make something, we’d love to see photos in the flickr auxiliary!

Our favorite? A mini-POV Cylon!

View all our Electronic Halloween posts here! From now until 10/31/2011 use the code HALLOWEEN on check out to get 10% off anything in our “EL Wire/Tape/Panel” category.

Zen Logic has been building a POV clock, and putting up great photos of the trials and tribulations of this DIY project!

winneymj writes -

After the kids (both girls aged 9 and 11) soldered their first minipov kit. I decided to JAZZ it up a bit and add some extra color LEDs to the board. Bought some green and yellow and a 3 way slider switch, along with some proto board and we can change the minipov color with the flick of a switch.

You can get miniPOV from Adafruit as always but please get one from Maker Shed and support these videos!

Ski pole POV via HaD…

MiniPOV! A simple POV toy for beginners who are looking to learn how to solder, how to program microcontrollers, or make LED blinky toys. Because the programmer is built into the kit, one does not need a special “microcontroller programmer”. This version can be used with PCs (Linux/Unix or Windows) and Macs (running MacOS X and with a USB/serial converter).

POV Message Generator, Zach writes -

I was bored on a plane, so I made a web interface to generate messages for the MiniPOV3. I found it to be immensely useful on my project, and thought I’d share it in case anyone else would like to use it. There’s a “Get C” button that will give you the C code for the image you drew. It’s at http://zachrattner.com/pov/ It’s all done in HTML/CSS/JS, so “View Source” will get you everything you need to hack it up.

Jay Silver’s (Drawdio inventor) holiday recommendations for the creative scientific thinker for 2010!

akula169 writes in – …

I decided my old tool at http://www.repulsor.net/minipov/ the pixel based entry was laborious at best. Great for custom graphics, but if you want to just quickly get some text in there, try my new tool: http://www.repulsor.net/minipov/text/Feedback expected and appreciated! Enjoy!

Steve’s custom case for miniPOV. Cookie tin & a CPU fan

Action POV – a knife that spells “kill” in the air via MAKE.

Looks like a MiniPOV – like device inside a paddle that spells, PING PONG! – Troika’s Restless Bats (NOTCOT).

Referring to Ron’s distinctive use of light and Corian, the PING PONG bats have integrated Leds which spell out PING and PONG in mid-air.

I’m a total newcomer to electronics, so I ordered LadyAda’s Toolkit, the Arduino starter pack, and I also got a miniPOV from makershed. I’m very happy to say that I successfully put the kit together and it works perfectly! Thanks for the very clear instructions, they made me feel like a pro. I had to order the serial to usb converter, as I’d neglected to, and added a couple of Arduino shields while I was at it. I’m hooked!, I’m going to get started on the Arduino tutorials now. Thanks for great products, tutorials and forums. I’m sure I’ll be asking a lot of questions along the way as I learn. I just wanted to stop in and say hi to everyone.

Andrew writes -

For a long time I’ve been interested in electronics, it comes with the geek territory. So when I read about the Arduino electronics platform and it’s ability to be programmed via Processing I was very excited. However, I decided to start small and build up my non-existent electronic skills.

To develop my skills I bought a MiniPOV v3 kit, this is a little kit designed to teach soldering, programming micro-controls and is just fun play with. In total, the kit took around five to six hours to construct and flash.

At first the soldering rather difficult and resulted in a few messy joints, but over time I got better, with faster and cleaner solders. While not perfect, it did work first time. I decided to document the process with a serious of photos and videos.

when i started building arduino brain machines i had a bunch of minipov boards left lying around, so i built one with uv leds. works pretty well. has it’s own font built in and room for about 950 characters of message. as presented here, there is an output bug at the end of the second line, but i reckon i’ll work on that in the morning. meanwhile, i can wave it around and wipe poetry onto a piece of butcher paper painted with fluorescent paint. here’s some not very good video of the chemical pov running the above code. the light does persist a little longer than it appears to in the video, but i think it will work better when i replace the current limiting resistors.

More to read in the forums…

When I was in grade school I made a menorah in Hebrew school. Unfortunately it was just made of plastic and wood and when we left it lit overnight it caught on fire and scorched our windowpane.

Ouch!

If only I had thought of making a Menorah using a MiniPOV kit, like mg-man!

Ryan of OHARARP, LLC is making a cool SMT practice kit, a persistence of vision toy!

Cool stuff: bright blue LEDs, boost converter means it runs on a single AA battery, USB connectivity to a PIC, comes with a stencil, solder paste, and wick.

Check it out here.

Too lazy to wave around your miniPOV? I can relate! But potxoli took it a step further by building a Lego robot to spin a MiniPOV around: Awesome!