Maker James Brown continues to be experimenting with turning rapidly-spinning two-dimensional LED matrices into depth-capable volumetric shows — with the most recent incarnation providing a dramatically improved decision and extra convincing depth impact.
We final checked out Brown’s somewhat-terrifying spinning 3D persistence-of-vision shows again in October final 12 months, when the decision was significantly decrease than it’s now. What was, then, a blocky picture with a comparatively shallow depth impact is now significantly extra detailed — to the purpose of, within the newest demonstration movies, having the ability to simply establish voxel fashions based mostly on designs from Id Software program’s authentic Doom.
Maybe the most important, change, although is the introduction of a brand new enclosure — sealing the rapidly-spinning LED matrices away from incautious and soon-to-be-removed fingers. On the lookout for all of the world like a crystal ball, the spherical housing incorporates a smoked plexiglass globe on a custom-built stand below which the driving electronics are housed.
“I’ve applied components of a content material pipeline for rendering a scene on the PC and streaming it to this show, however writing video streaming code is a lot much less enjoyable than taking part in with voxels that it might take some time to complete,” Brown writes of the challenge’s software program aspect. “Right here, I’ve saved the animation uncompressed on the show itself, and am updating it as quick because the [Raspberry] Pi’s SD card can deal with. (Not very quick.)”
“My goal for this show is 600 rpm [revolutions per minute] — decrease than that and it is too flickery; larger than that and I am unable to refresh quick sufficient to get 400 voxels across the circumference with out dropping to 1 bpc [bit per color],” Brown provides.
Brown’s newest demo movies can be found in his Mastodon thread; “guess I am doing a cone subsequent,” he writes of the following step within the challenge, which has already seen the creation of cylindrical and spherical shows.