This week, my goal was to prototype the persistence of vision yoyo and get a simple mesage displaying, as well as write a GUI for the POV yoyo. Minimally, I wanted a circuit which fit inside a yoyo that, when I waved it back and forth, would spell out a message. And I wanted a simply python GUI which would spit chunks of 6 bits “010001” out into a file, based on which buttons were “depressed.”

Neither of these happened... I had been using other’s code with very minor modifications and didn’t realize how much I didn’t understand. I spent most of my time not on this week’s actual assignment, unfortunately.

What I did get done:

Comparison with old perfboard to pcb circuit, 8 led charlieplexed.

Testing reveals that all 6 LEDs work as expected.

Code and schematic at: https://github.com/nouyang/pov-yoyo

And then the GUI, the idea being people would click on the buttons to get the image they wanted to display on the pov yoyo, and this program would send it via ISP to the circuit: