MiniPOV3- Persistence of Vision
I’ve had these Persistence of Vision kits sitting under my desk at MindKits headquarters and I had been meaning to build one up since we got them into stock. As these things often go, the time never rolled around until last weekend, which was February 14th, or Valentines Day.
Hacking the Wetware
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 by flashing them at exactly the right moment and in the right sequence. Very cool – hacking the wetware!
Layers, like an Onion
Assembling the kit took about 30 minutes from start to finish including a couple of trips to fill up my glass of red wine so even the beginner wont have too many problems putting the kit together. And this brings me to what really impressed me with this kit; you can treat it as a kit assembly project, dump a prewritten program on it and never have to even look at a line of code. If you’d like to delve deeper into the tech you can modify the same code and replace snippets with your own words to control what the kit displays. There’s even a website to help you with the sequencing (http://www.repulsor.net/minipov/) .If you’d like to really strap on the socks and sandals, don the cardigan and wear the legendary black rimmed glasses you can write your own code for the microprocessor, expand on whets there or integrate it into other projects. The kit circuit board has already been etched for you to develop it further with a mercury switch which tells the processor which way the POV3 is moving so it displays the text around the write way always.
All in all this is a brilliant kit for the learner who wants something that’s sure to bring satisfaction when the lights turn on for the first time. For the seasoned professional there’s more to cut your teeth on that will keep you busy for hours.
Who Says Tech isn’t Romantic?
So, now I must confess that building the POV3 kit wasn’t purely in the interest of drinking wine and soldering up kit. It was Feb 13th, the day before Valentines and as always my fiancé and I had decided we wouldn’t ‘do’ Valentines Day. This as I have learnt in my wise old years is a decoy move and it was in my best interests to come up with something both cost effective and interesting. I built the POV3 kit, programmed it on the only machine I had with a serial port (a Linux box) and at the appropriately lit moment put my arm around her and proclaimed that she ‘lit up the sky’ for me. My timing was perfect and as the words rolled from my mouth I waved my new magic wand of romance and pulled the POV across our field of view. A line of red hearts flashed across the room and she melted. Mission accomplished - originality, cost effective, romantic and it doesn’t die in a week and go out in the rubbish as a shrivelled heap of vegetation.
These kits are available from the MindKits store and contain everything you need to build them up except batteries. They even come with double-sided sticky tape to hold the battery pack and board together so you’ll avoid the POV projectile. Enjoy
Written by Tim
MindKits Chief Ninja
