LED Display from Ceiling Fan

Overview

The project illustrates the effect of persistence of vision to easily create a ceiling fan LED display.

Explanation

The design of the project includes fan blades made out of some plywood with rectangular shape and shorter than the originals. The smaller shape maintained a low weight so that the support will not be stressed when spinning. There is so much support in the project along with the programming environment since the circuit was based on the Arduino platform.

The boards were made from single-sided copper clad which were etched using the mixture of muriatic acid and hydrogen peroxide and they were easily cut using a table saw.  The holes were drilled using a small hobby drill index and there are almost 200 holes on the board with the microcontroller. The LEDs were soldered on the copper side of the board and a small plug was used as a spacer to keep the height uniform as they were installed, since the board is single-sided.

There are 32 lights in each of the 5 blades of the fan which results to requiring 10 boards. The LEDs were driven using the Atmel ATmega328 and 74HC595 shift registers.