I ordered a really cool persistence of vision kit called the MiniPOV from Adafruit.com for $17.50. It’s really cool.



The MiniPOV uses a Atmel ATtiny2313V-10PU microcontroller. The firmware has to be written to the chip with whatever message you want the MiniPOV to display. Once the kit arrives, you’ll have to go to ladyada.com (she designed the kit) to get the installation instructions for the compiler as well as the firmware. Her attention to detail is incredible and possibly the best “how to” instructions I’ve ever seen. It’s very well written and leaves nothing open to interpretation.

The parts in the kit are top quality! It’s the nicest board I’ve ever seen. I want to design my own kit just so I can have some nice boards like hers made up! I wonder if she uses ExpressPCB?

The MiniPOV uses a serial port to write to the microcontroller. Since my MacBook does not have a serial port, I needed to pick up a serial-to-USB adapter. Ladyada suggested the GWC AP1100 from Newegg.com. Newegg.com calls it “GWC UC320 USB 1.1 to Serial Converter Cable”, but it was the AP1100 that arrived as Ladyada had said.

GWC AP1100 Serial to USB adapter for computers without a serial port. $14.99





Lucky for me both packages arrived today, Friday. So I have all weekend to mess around with them!

Fast forward to Saturday night, here’s the workflow...

Top quality board.



Top quality parts.



Get your iron hot and your tools/supplies out. (Yes, coffee is a supply!)



I’ve always liked all my resistor bands facing the same way. OCD anyone?



Diodes: check



Serial port: check



LEDs: check



DIP socket: check



Battery pack: check



Final Assembly: Batteries and microcontroller installed.



Power it up and check it out....

Yeah! It works! This 7 second video clip shows the default LED sequence.



Next is to program it with a new LED sequence. This 10 second video shows what the write sequence looks like.



Yeah! Programing works! This 10 second video clip shows the result of the new program loaded: a new LED sequence.



Next up, load my own custom image! This 10 second video shows that my custom “Kevin” image has ben successfully loaded.



Here’s a video snippet looped for 5 seconds showing the final results in action….



…and a single frame: