{"id":27399,"date":"2020-12-18T21:07:52","date_gmt":"2020-12-18T19:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cornay.co.za\/wp\/?p=27399"},"modified":"2020-12-18T21:07:52","modified_gmt":"2020-12-18T19:07:52","slug":"edge-mounted-leds-make-this-spherical-pov-look-fantastic-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cornay.co.za\/wp\/2020\/12\/18\/edge-mounted-leds-make-this-spherical-pov-look-fantastic-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Edge-Mounted LEDs Make This Spherical POV Look Fantastic"},"content":{"rendered":"

For as many of them as we’ve seen, we still love a good persistence of vision display project. There’s something fascinating about the combination of movement and light creating the illusion of solid surfaces, and there’s always fun to be had in electromechanical aspects of a POV build. This high-resolution spherical POV display<\/a> pushes all those buttons, and more.<\/p>\n

Called “Flicker” for obvious reasons by its creator [Dan Foisy], this POV display started with a pretty clear set of goals in terms of resolution and image quality, plus the need to support animated images, all in a spherical form factor. These goals dictated the final form of the display — a PCB disc spinning vertically. The shaft has the usual slip rings for power distribution and encoders for position feedback. The PCB, though, is where the interesting stuff is.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>[Dan] chose to use an FPGA to slice and dice the images, which are fed from a Raspberry Pi’s HDMI port, to the LED drivers. And the LEDs themselves are pretty slick — he found parts with 1.6 mm lead spacing, making them a perfect fit for mounting on the rim of the PCB rather than on either side. A KiCAD script automated the process of laying out the 256 LEDs and their supporting components as evenly as possible, to avoid imbalance issues.<\/p>\n

The video below shows Flicker in action — there are a few problem pixels, but on the whole, the display is pretty stunning. We’ve seen a few other spherical POV displays<\/a> before, but none that look as good as this one does.<\/p>\n

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