Arduino - Glow in the POV

For this school assignment, I had to build a working project with an Arduino. Doesn't sound to difficult right, but there's a lot more to it than you think.

I chose to make a "POV Tube". This is a tube that spins around, covered with glow in the dark paint, while blacklight LEDs flash on the tube. Through the Persistence of Vision (POV), you're able to read text on it.

This project is inspirered by the "Arduino - POV Wand", from ahmadsaeed.

As we move the light source or an object on which the light shines quickly enough, a trail of light will appear, and our brains will start to see the letter "Z"

My project uses Persistence of Vision (POV). Persistence of Vision is a type of optical illusion where the human eye continues to briefly see an image even after it has disappeared.

The eye takes a certain amount of time to pick up information from an image. That time is about a tenth of a second. If the image passes by faster than that, the eye does not pick up the information properly. For example, as in a fan, the blades move faster than a tenth of a second. As a result, the eye merges the incomplete information as one image, forming a circle.

• Arduino NANO
• 7 LEDs (Blacklight)
• 7 resistors - 220 ohm
• 12V Power Supply
• 2 Pins DC Power Jack
• Isolation Tape
• 9 elektronic wires
• Record Player
• PVC Tube
• Glow in the dark Paint
• Solder tin
• Soldering Iron
• 3D-Printer

To change the message you want to display, you have to change the first two lines in the code. The first one is the word you want to display, and the second one is the message length.

If you change these two lines to your liking, your code is ready to be uploaded!

The purpose of this code is to split any text input into individual characters and then split those characters down into columns. Each column is then displayed on a single-column LED matrix, with short pauses between each column.

For example, when displaying the letter "S" on a 5x7 LED matrix, the state of the LEDs in each column (top to bottom) can be described using binary display.

Column1: Row1: LOW Row2: HIGH Row3: HIGH Row4: LOW Row5: LOW Row6: HIGH Row7: LOW

Column1: LOW - HIGH - HIGH - LOW - LOW - HIGH -LOW

Column1: 0 1 1 0 0 1

And for the rest of the columns it will be like this:

Column2: 1 0 0 1 0 0 1

Column3: 1 0 0 1 0 0 1

Column4: 1 0 0 1 0 0 1

Column5: 0 1 0 0 1 1 0