I thought the best way of going about running the display is to provide my own micro to control the leds, at this stage Im not too interested in using the light detectors (they seem to be photodiodes), but the synchonising detector is provided on this board so Ill use it for this reason and to balance the spinner.

For simplicity and size, I chose to use a Leostick (Freetronics version of the Arduino Leonardo) for my MCU. I cant use the same mount for because the motor shaft needs to contact the protective dome so the board would need a hole through the middle. After much pondering I decided to mount the micro by attaching it on the motor shaft using cable ties, it shouldnt upset the balance too much.

Writing the code

The original board ran at 24Mhz, the MCU Im using runs at 8MHz so timing may be critcal to get it working correctly so Ill avoid using the Arduino syntax for efficiency. The idea was to get the same led sequence running as the original using my own power supply and not being attached to the spinner, then get it running on the spinner.