1 Dec 2023
Progress: Completed
Take a look at a tiny volumetric display!
Video Demo
Naturally you can’t really feel the volumetric effect on camera. It looks a lot more 3D in real life.
Idea
Join me for a chat in a cozy pub with some very creative and talented buddies! The conversation got interesting as we discussed the possibility of creating something that would look like a flickering candle from any angle. I suggested a persistence-of-vision display, but the general consensus was that those require too much in the way of supporting machinery to make them work: bearings, and probably slip rings and so on.
Nevertheless, after a bit of pondering I came up with an idea. What if the motor and battery were small enough, the whole thing could spin? I quickly threw together a simple LED matrix board and combined it with the other orders for circuit boards from China.
It’s about time I tell you about the time I got access to a pick and place machine (a Charmhigh CHM-T36VA). I have it on semi-permanent loan. It’s specifically for another project, which I will write up eventually, but my feelings on it can be summarised as follows: Robots are the Future. I’ve spent enough of my life manually assembling circuit boards that to have a machine that can build a board in seconds right in front of me is bliss.
Within this incredible technology, there is one drawback – loading the reels takes a long time. However. This LED matrix has precisely one component, and so loading the reels was as short as technically possible. Then we can crank out the boards at break-neck speed!
I went ahead and just laser-etched a stencil in acetate. This project was still very much at the minimal-investment stage, where I’m just idly throwing ideas around. But a generic tiny LED matrix seemed like a worthwhile thing to have a handful of, it will almost certainly come in handy.
I did some with 0603 and also some with 0805, as I had some of those already loaded.
If the circuit board design hadn’t been a rush job, I’d have also made a circular PCB to support it at a right angle. The pads along the bottom were to solder directly between the boards. When I come to building the next version, that’s what I’ll do.
For now I was playing with ideas. I knew that I wanted a microcontroller with a fair bit of flash memory on it,