If you frequent our social media channels then you know just how much we love GIFs, so just imagine our excitement when we stumbled upon this Hackster.io project. Persistence of vision, or “POV,” refers to the way human minds can combine several moving images into one. After being inspired by other displays using this principle, Maker Harald “hanoba” Bauer decided to make his own in the form of a cylinder.
In his build, he attached four programmable LED strips to the outside of a 200mm diameter foam cylinder. This cylinder, which contains an Arduino Due (SAM3X8E), a Bluetooth module, and other electronics, spins via a motor and belt drive on the bottom of the assembly. An infrared receiver is used to detect the position of the cylinder to coordinate the display, and the display is controlled by a PC via Bluetooth.
As it spins, the four LED strips, each containing 10 color LEDs, are coordinated to light and display GIFs wrapped around the cylinder. The results look great in the video below – a really neat project with a solid mechanical design.
If you’d like to create your own, he provides electrical schematics, a list of the part used, as well as a mechanical sketch on his Hackster.io page here. You can also find links there for the Arduino software, and the PC control code, including a graphical user interface.