Archive for October 19th, 2009

This will be a 7 part blog posting on one project at varying stags of completion that my daughter and I worked on over our fall vacation.

My daughter wanted to install a POV (persistence of view) device on her bicycle spokes which would allowed her to draw images on her laptop and upload the drawings to be displayed in her spokes as she rode around at night.  I found the best kit for this at Adafruit.com called SpokePOV. 

Below is a short video of the final assembled and functioning kit with a manga type winking happy face animation my daughter created in Photoshop.  

My digital camera set to video record makes the image appear shaky and flashy but this looks a ton better to the human eye.  I guess you will just have to take me at my word for now, but later I will try to get better video using a real camcorder.

The seven blog posts I’m planning, starting with this one, will be:
  1) Assembling the 3 SpokePOV boards & setup for single sensor triggering
  2) Mounting an adjustable magnet on the bike frame for SpokePOV trigger
  3) Building bench testing rig for SpokePOV
  4) Programming images and setting the SpokePOV board offsets
  5) Halloween image uploads with video of SpokePOV in action
  6) Troubleshooting and resolving SpokePOV image skew issue
  7) Fixing image skew issue using my own creation called “Corrective Raiser image Board” (CRiB)

PART 1) Assembling the 3 SpokePOV boards & setup for single sensor triggering

My 17yr old daughter did all the assembly and photographing.  She has been doing PCB board assembling since she was six years old and is one of the best at using a solder iron I have seen, including myself.  She only burnt herself once but that was actually my fault because I was holding the iron and pointing at something. So truthfully I burnt her, she didn’t burn herself.

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