Using the included software and customizing your display.

Step 18: Using the included software and customizing your display.

I have programmed two applications using visual basic to allow you to convert your own images for to show on the spinning display. Again, you can download these from here:

http://www.bradsprojects.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=344

Now remember that the LED's are only turning on and off. There is no variation in brightness so this gives us a total of eight colors to work with. Having said that, the conversion software does not to bad a job and giving you a presentable output.

The first application allows you to import quite a large image and then it will display it on the POV display by scrolling it from top to bottom. You can import just about any image that you want however you need to make sure that the output settings you enter in are less than or equal to the image size otherwise you will get an error (because the software will be trying to convert pixels that don't exist!

Furthermore, since the display has eight LED's, you need to make sure that the height of your output image is divisible by eight.

other than that - you can go nuts and try whatever you like. You can adjust the LED on and off times and also the speed of the animation. The greater the LED on time, then the more stretched the image will be. The greater the LED off time then the greater the space between pixels.

The second application is for scrolling text and images from left to right. This is perfect for something like a shop window for if you wanted to do some cool looking advertising. Again this is quite customizable although this time you can't change the height of the graphic because there are only eight LED's and we are not scrolling vertically. You can change the LED on time and off time, the speed and you can also specify how many columns you want to be displayed at any one time.

Please read on to the next step for full details of how to use the display in scroll down mode.