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The POV Globe project is mostly completed except for the never-ending tweeks that will no doubt keep happening for years to come (or until it breaks completely). {{:pov_globe.jpg?600|}} I got the idea from [[http://makezine.com/projects/persistence-vision-led-globe/|this article]] in Make: magazine, although my build ended up being quite different from theirs. The first major change was the decision that 8 inches in diameter and 40 LEDs just wasn't going to cut it. I resisted the pressure to make it large enough for a person to ride inside of it and settled on a roughly 16" diameter and 74 LEDs. I cut a circular template on the CNC router and tried bending a piece of aluminum around this to create the circular frame, but I was unable to get anything satisfactorily close to a circle (and I wasn;t just being picky - it was pretty bad). At that point (and why it took so long I can't say) it occurred to me that I could 3D print a near-perfect circle, and the lighter material would also be safer and easier on the motor. The print bed isn't large enough for a 16" diameter circle, but it was easy to design it in Fusion 360 to be in 4 sections with connectors holding the sections together. I used an LED strip (neopixels are apparently not fast enough for a good POV display, so I used DotStar) instead of individual RGB leds and just glued it to the frame with contact cement. I initially used a nano as the controller and and ESP8366-01 to give it WiFi capability, but Robert suggested I just use an ESP8266 Huzzah breakout board as the controller with built in WiFi. He even gave me one to use! Thanks, Robert! The built-in WiFi simplified the code considerably, and the faster speed (80 MHz vs 16 MHz) helped a lot as well.
