MindKits News and Blog

Persistence of Vision Kit- MiniPOV3 - See how an Adafruit MiniPOV3 Kit comes in handy for Valentines Day. These make a great beginners kits with utterly loads of extra learning and expansion to keep you learning and entertained for hours.

If you’re wondering what Persistence of Vision is you’re not alone. Some say it’s a bug in our biology but it comes about because of the chemical electric nature of our eyes. When we see light, it kicks off a chemical reaction and we get a zap to the brain that tells us what we’re seeing. The thing is that this chemical reaction takes some time and as a result the light that we saw could be long gone but the chemical reaction still carries on telling us its there. We’ve all seen this before when waving a sparkler in the air at Guy Fawkes when moving it quickly through the air – it leaves what looks to us to be a trail. The end result? With a line of 8 Led’s we can write words in thin air. Oh the opportunities for mischief are endless!
Very cool – hacking the wetware!

We're back after the break and thought I would share this next link to Ted.Com and a talk on Persistence of Vision.
Inventor Nick Sears demos the first generation of the Orb, a rotating persistence-of-vision display that creates glowing 3D images. A short, cool tale of invention.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/nick_sears_demos_the_orb.html

If you're looking to play around with persistence of vision yourself you can do so with the MiniPov3 Kit available from MindKits. You can program it to say anything you wish.
http://www.mindkits.com/_product_36247/Mini_POV-_Persistence_of_Vision_Kit