mPOV is a project to make small LED persistence of vision
displays. The idea behind this is that your retina does some
integration of photons over time, so if a one dimensional
display is swept across your field of vision, a two
dimensional image can end up in your brain for a fleeting
instant.
You have probably seen these displays around; clocks, kids
toys, etc. For some reason I didn't really get turned on to
how cool they are until I saw Frostbyte's famous and
mind blowing LED towers, which he was nice enough to bring to
several of the parties at 324.
Anyway, if I think something is neat I pretty much always get
around to the idea of glueing it to my shaved head. So I
wanted to make a POV system that used surface mount LEDs
packed in as closely as possible.
Rev x01 has the controller and the LED modules built as
seperate boards, so that N LED boards can be chained up to a
single controller to form different sized displays. The
controller is built around an MSP430 from TI, and the LED
modules use a CMOS shift register and 0805 size LEDs from
digikey.
