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I made this little persistence of vision (POV) display for my kids. It's a ATtiny85 microcontroller (overkill, really), some LEDs and a coin battery I had lying around. The battery holder I made from a paper clip. I got the idea from an Instructable, but the guy's code was pretty bad. I rewrote the microcontroller code to spell out my son's name when it's waved in the air.

I didn't have the 50 dollar AVR programmer board to program the chip. But I thought I might be able to do it with an Arduino. Turns out not only could I, but part of that functionality is actually built into the Arduino IDE. It also turns out you could just use the Arduino library on the ATtiny, but I'd already written the low-level bit pushing code. Which was cooler anyway. The squid-like bit is a programmer board I made to make this easier in the future. It uses the incredibly high tech power of masking tape to identify how to hook it to the Arduino.




And here's a brief video of it in action. You'll probably notice that I changed out the greens for reds. Greens consume more power and were much dimmer. I used reds to balance out the intensity.

[DOUBLEPOST=1389592885,1389592550][/DOUBLEPOST]Oh yeah. Total cost about $3. Most of that is the ATtiny, which is basically a full late 80s era computer on a chip the size of your pinky nail. For a buck-fifty. 8 MHz with some measly amount of RAM and an EEPROM "disk".

I misread this and thought you'd made a homemade HUD at first. Like, a holographic display that would appear in front of you.

But this is only a whisker less cool than that.

Now you need to attach it to their bike wheel and program it with expletives. They'll be the coolest kids in the neighborhood overnight!

The fact that you have even half a clue what the shit you were doing and made impresses the hell out of me.