Overview

CardPOV is a pocketable persistence of vision (POV) device. The original idea was to develop a POV business card, but the project has since evolved into a palm-sized, pocketable POV display, with improvements over the popular MiniPOV project developed by Adafruit Industries. Like all NBitWonder projects, CardPOV is 100% open source, and is subject to the NBitWonder’s default legal terms.

Documentation and Source Files

CardPOV is an open source project, and all files are made available online free for your use. For the latest source files and documentation on the CardPOV project, please see the project’s github repository.

Theory of Operation

The CardPOV device uses 7 LEDs which are blinked in a pattern at high speeds to create a persistence of vision illusion. A string of binary numbers (hex values) is loaded into the CardPOV, with 1′s representing LEDs that are active for a given instant in time and 0′s representing inactive LEDs. By successively loading hex values from memory onto the I/O port which the LEDs are connected to at regular time instants, a POV display is generated.

Media

A video demonstration of the CardPOV project is provided below: