POV Display

The idea for this project started with an assigment for class to create a light that uses an Arudino. It uses the persistence of vision illusion to make a 2D string of LED's appear to form a 3D image. A hall effect sensor is used to measure the rotation of the LED ring and update the pixels accordingly. The main challenge of this build was figuring out a way to transfer power and data to something that was spinning at 1000+ RPM. I did some research and found that some other people online resolved this issue by attaching the Arduino and power source to the LED ring itself, and let the whole assembly rotated together. Personally, I disliked this solution, as I think that one of the cool parts of this display is the ability to see straight through it when it isn't rotating, so it just looks like the text being displayed is floating. As such, I designed my own commutator ring that allowed 4 channels of power or data to be passed from the stationary base up to the rotating ring without any wires that spin. The signal is transfered from the copper rings of the commutator to the carbon brushes that are on the LED bracket. All of the parts were custom made, many of which I designed and printed myself using my FDM printer. The final result was almost exactly what I had hoped for, although I was a bit restricted on what I could display due to the low memory available on the Arudino Pro Nano that I used to power the device. Overall though, it was a great learning experience and very satisfying to see it work.