This project is for teaching soldering where I work. I did teach a small group of co-workers soldering the POV kit. We had fun, it was great!
The boards are already arrived. I put a photo of them in the gallery.
I think this is an ideal project for people who never soldered before and want to build something funny to use.
I made a new V3 version of my LED POV! Now it can be plugged in to a USB port via USB to serial adapter. The patterns can be flashed by my own flash program for Linux and Windows.
Or by a serial port terminal program like hyperterm or cutecom! The data which is send is plain text!
I now developed a V3 version of my POV LED 8 red project. The board can be connected with a USB to serial adapter to flash the blink patterns! This is more reliable as the bluetooth version.
I wrote a special flashing program for Linux and Windows. The Windows version could not be tested yet.
I added a HC-05 bluetooth module to one of my POV boards. The bluetooth module needs 3.3 V, so I used a step up power supply which outputs that.
I wrote a simple Android app "Blinken Edit" to draw patterns for the POV board. The patterns can be saved and load. And can be flashed over bluetooth to the POV board. The patterns are stored in the PIC microcontroller data EEPROM (128 bytes on PIC 16F628A).
Here is the board with the upper black iso tape removed, to show the bluetooth module: