Building the MiniPOV v3
For a long time I've been interested in electronics, it comes with the geek territory. So when I read about the Arduino electronics platform and it's ability to be programmed via Processing I was very excited. However, I decided to start small and build up my non-existent electronic skills.To develop my skills I bought a MiniPOV v3 kit, this is a little kit designed to teach soldering, programming micro-controls and is just fun play with. In total, the kit took around five to six hours to construct and flash.At first the soldering rather difficult and resulted in a few messy joints, but over time I got better, with faster and cleaner solders. While not perfect, it did work first time. I decided to document the process with a serious of photos and videos.
Once the kit was built, the final stage was to program the micro-controller. The device is connected the the PC via USB to Serial port converter (bought with the kit) and flashed with a C compiled hex file. The message is stored in the source code as a two-dimensional array of eight binary values per row. Each binary value represents a single LED and each row is a strip of LEDs.For example:
b8(00000001) # All LED's off except for the last oneTo write out a simple message such as "HELLO" you need to create each row and work out which LED's are on and which are off, this can become very tedious for longer messages. Therefore, I quickly coded a MiniPOV Online Text Generator. This tool allows you to simply build up a messages by clicking on boxes and then generating the required C code ready to be pasted into the source code. Nice and easy.I use the Linux distro Ubuntu as my OS, this made programming the MiniPOV relatively easy. The first thing is to install the required software: gcc, avrdude, avr-libc, binutils-avr and gcc-a (for Windows or Mac, the official MiniPOV site has more details). With all the required software installed, it was a simple matter of overwriting the table image[] in mypov.c file with the custom code generated earlier, compiling the code and flashing the device.I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process, learnt a lot and developed a bunch of new skills. Now I'm really excited to move on to my next project, a two-player Pong kit that hooks up to your TV via S-Video. It's going to be awesome.
Once the kit was built, the final stage was to program the micro-controller. The device is connected the the PC via USB to Serial port converter (bought with the kit) and flashed with a C compiled hex file. The message is stored in the source code as a two-dimensional array of eight binary values per row. Each binary value represents a single LED and each row is a strip of LEDs.For example:
b8(00000001) # All LED's off except for the last oneTo write out a simple message such as "HELLO" you need to create each row and work out which LED's are on and which are off, this can become very tedious for longer messages. Therefore, I quickly coded a MiniPOV Online Text Generator. This tool allows you to simply build up a messages by clicking on boxes and then generating the required C code ready to be pasted into the source code. Nice and easy.I use the Linux distro Ubuntu as my OS, this made programming the MiniPOV relatively easy. The first thing is to install the required software: gcc, avrdude, avr-libc, binutils-avr and gcc-a (for Windows or Mac, the official MiniPOV site has more details). With all the required software installed, it was a simple matter of overwriting the table image[] in mypov.c file with the custom code generated earlier, compiling the code and flashing the device.I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process, learnt a lot and developed a bunch of new skills. Now I'm really excited to move on to my next project, a two-player Pong kit that hooks up to your TV via S-Video. It's going to be awesome.
