Bicycle POV version 1

This is my first real project involving a PIC where I am not using anyone else’s plans or designs.

So what is Bicycle POV?
POV is an abbreviation for Persistence Of Vision, which is a phenomena experienced by humans that causes an after-image of an object to remain, even though the object has moved.

For example, if something is moving fast, say, a spinning wheel, it will appear to be stationary, or it will appear to be moving much more slowly then it actually is.

For a better example, see Wikipedia

Bicycle POV exploits this phenomena to write text (such as your speed, how far you’ve travelled and anything else you desire) on your bicycle wheel as you ride.

Hardware
The brains of Bicycle POV are a PIC 16F88 microcontroller.
Currently, I am using green LED’s, but I have some nice blue super-brights which I will put in the final device.
Version 2 will include a hall effect sensor for determining wheel speed and resynchronising the text.

Software
The firmware was written using MikroBASIC.
To assist in working out the code for lettering, I am using a simple VB6 application consisting of a set of tick-boxes. The desired letter is formed by ticking and unticking the boxes and the code is generated.

Here is a video of version 1 in action.

The blog has finally arrived!

After about two months, I have finally gotten around to finding some suitable blogging software and successfully installed it. I must say that I was impressed by the ease of installation, I expected it to be much harder and require a lot of manual text file editing.

As you have probably already realised, the software that I am using is WordPress. I chose WordPress for several reasons, including its price (free), popularity, simplicity and ease of use and set up and that it allows you to install it under your own server/domain.

Originally I was considering writing the software myself, however my PHP knowledge and general HTML knowledge is mediocre at best and I really don’t have the time to be fiddling around with the planning, debugging and beautifying of what would probably turn out to be a nasty looking blog that wouldn’t have all of the functionality of a common place blogging software.

So far I am very happy with the way WordPress is performing and hope to add some new content very soon.