Building an RGBike POV Device

Overview

The project aims to display text, images, and small animations by building this full color RGBike POV.

Explanation

The assembly of this open source project is much easier because it is entirely a through-hole design that uses 16 RGB LEDs on a single layer printed circuit board. The display of images will be synchronized by using a Hall Effect sensor. The RGBike POV fits perfectly in 26” wheels although one disadvantage of the design is that the LEDs are illuminated on only one side of the wheel. For the width of the line in the wheel to be controlled, it only requires controlling how many times the line is repeated.

By specifying the value of a single resistor, the current that flow through the LEDs is being limited. The supply of 16 LEDs is controlled by the TLC5940 driver which has 4096 levels of grey. A common cathode RGB LEDs is required for the method where the driver IC sinks the LEDs.

The can be programmed into the microcontroller as the POV was designed to be compatible with the Arduino where the FTDI USB-TTL232 cable was used. The Arduino also uses the TLC5940 library.