POV toys seem to be becoming very common as of late. Some designs I like a lot, like Ada's (and her more elaborate version for use on bike wheels). Others are more clunky. But almost universally, the available POV designs are monochrome. For the most part there isn't any brightness control either. The notable exception to this was Frostbyte's Obelisk project. Unfortunately, the Obelisk wasn't open source, wasn't for sale, and Frostbyte is no longer with us. So I decided to see what was involved with making a full-color POV toy with brightness control on each color element.

Tonight I finished up the layout for an initial prototype and sent it off to ExpressPCB to have it fabbed. The design includes 10 surface-mount RGB LEDs (each 5mm x 5mm) and has 9-bit brightness control for each element of each LED. The processor is a Silicon Labs C8051F007. The board is 3.8" x 2.5" (and aside from the LEDs and drivers, I didn't put any work into maximizing the board density).

That's the LEDs and drivers in the upper-left, JTAG and RS232 connectors along the right edge, power supplies in the lower-left, microcontroller in the center and the RS232 level shifter just below that. For more techno-babble about the design, see my wiki page.

Assuming I can get reasonable results with this 10-pixel prototype, I'm going to move on to a scalable modular design with 14" long segments each with 60 LEDs and 18 drivers on them. They won't be cheap, but they should look great. :)