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Inspiration for this project

A project log for Persistence of Vision Fidget Spinner

POV Fidget spinner which uses Enhanced PIC16 AngularTimer peripheral, Bluetooth Low Energy 4.2 link, LabVIEW PC application, touch button...

matej-nogiMatej Nogić 05/31/2019 at 17:230 Comments

Last year I was at the Embedded World fair in Nurnberg, Germany. There was a Microchip's booth where they, among many things, presented their new peripheral in PIC16 series MCUs, called Angular Timer. As a demo of this new feature they developed a fidget spinner which they were giving away:

This is the moment I got an idea to do one by myself. Of course, I didn't want my project to be the same as theirs so I was looking for ways how to improve the Microchip's fidget spinner. 

At the end I came up with fidget spinner which is nothing like the Microchip's, except for the MCU (because of the AT) and the BLE module (it was the smallest BLE module I could find on the market at the time). My fidget spinner has:

- Improved resolution (32 LEDs instead of 8)

- Two colors of LEDs

- Much better efficiency in terms of battery usage which leads to longer battery life

- Capacitive touch button for turning on and changing between the different modes

- Uses only one magnet and omnipolar hall sensor instead of two magnets and bipolar sensor which reduces costs and assembly time

You can read more about Microchip's fidget spinner here: https://www.microchip.com/promo/bluetooth-fidget-spinner

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