FamiLAB POV (Persistence of Vision) Kit

For some time, we’ve wanted to make a FamiLAB kit that could be used for soldering classes, and then extended by the students as they moved into learning microcontrollers or other topics.

As with most things in life – it took someone with some passion and drive to make it finally happen – kudos to Mike Bakula for prototyping a kit, getting input from the community, and then producing our first kit!

This kit uses an ATTINY to light up the LEDs on the end, and when waved back & forth or spun, you can read a word of text!  Mike built the first PCB during the April Open House and then passed it around for everyone to enjoy 🙂  We still need to do a production run, order all the parts to populate the boards, and design a new class using the boards – stay tuned!

Here’s the breadboard version for testing…

The ATTINY is programmed using the Arduino ISP, in this case with a ZIF socket on a protoshield. Adafruit has a kit to build this kind of shield if you want to try this at home…

The PCB design after some community input…

Here’s the first PCB from BatchPCB before any components were added…we had a silkscreen error, so no FamiLAB logo on this board – but it will be there on the production run!