This is an idea I had a while back after making my persistence of vision toy. Unlike that though, this thing had to be small and lightweight. To accomplish this, I was going to need to etch my own PCB rather than using perfboard. That’s what this was all about. I’ll be providing a tutorial on that later.
So, unlike the persistence of vision toy, I wanted this thing to have some sense of where it was in order to blink the LEDs properly. All I needed was a single trigger at a set location. I could then use the time between triggers to calculate how fast the user is waving the device around and use that frequency to attempt to blink the LEDs at the same location in every cycle. Image stability makes text much easier to read.
My original thoughts were to use an accelerometer, but that presents several unknowns. For example, as the user is waving to the right, he or she might actually be slowing down slightly which would register as a leftwards acceleration. Also, accelerometers are generally fairly expensive, and I was trying to keep costs down. I decided to consult a similar gadget and do some reverse engineering.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
