Still lots to work on, but basic POV functionality is working. Haven't figured out good timings that make it easy to see without swinging the circuit board around yet. Here is a shot I took by panning the camera across my lab:
Anyway, I got all three PWM drivers and all 10 RGB LEDs populated now. The circuit is fully operational except for the RS-232 level shifter which I haven't populated yet. I gotta get on that, because this re-flashing the processor every time I want to change some little thing is really irritating.
...and now that I look at it, my decision to not bother with the second T in "TEST" was a mistake. I have clearly POV'd "TESTES." Great.
So...on a completely unrelated note, the main drive in my fileserver ate itself earlier tonight. You know, the one with my movable type database on it. Oh, and the web root for everything published through movable type.
Thankfully, freezing the drive for 30 minutes bought me enough runtime (~15 mins or so) to copy all the requisite bits onto multiple other machines ... so at least the journals are safe.
But /dev/null (et al.) will be offline until tomorrow, when I can patch a new drive in.
The moral of the story: backup often.
Ahh, the joys of freezing drives. My lab notebook's drive died 2 months before I filed my dissertation. I literally woke up to the sound of the drive screaming, which is not a good way to start the day. In the end, I stuck the drive in a USB casing and alternated 15 minutes of freezing with 5 minutes of data transfer (which is all I could get before it would crash again) for several hours.
It's such a sick, horrible feeling. "My data is there... no, my data _was_ there..."
Mouser: Congratulations, you have the brightest, flashiest testes I've seen since Uncle Henry sat down in the ultrasonic jewelry cleaner.
I'm intrigued, what exactly is POV? (I did try searching Google first, I swear!)
POV stands for Persistence Of Vision, a phenomenon of the human brain (or possibly the retina) that retains an image for a short time even after the light is no longer striking your retina. It is the phenomena that prevents TVs and movie screens from appearing to flicker, even though the screen is dark for some significant fraction of the time. In this case, a single column of lights is blinking out columns of an image, and the camera moved such that, during the time of the exposure, the LEDs blinked out the complete image. See the previous post for an image of the circuit board without the motion.
More info on POV can be found at Wikipedia.
How far did you get with this? I'm also trying to build my own static POV display, but currently going the route of an array of ATmega32's, each controlling 32 LEDs via a Darlington Array booster (I want to keep the first design simple so I can hopefully incorporate software PWM, and LEDs are cheap - LED drivers less so). Having never experienced the commercial SignLine, or FrostByte's displays, I'm hoping that the final effect is less subtle than my initial 7 LED test-bed. There's some great photos on the web of the Obelisk (particularly the Mona Lisa image), but of course there's a huge difference between swiping a camera across the image, and actually being able to see it in reality. I was hoping you'd have got a bit further with your one so you could have posted something like "My God, it works, and it's brilliant!" to give me a boost of hope!