With a bunch of RGB (Red Green Blue) LEDs you can make a real cool display. This one was made using a Microchip 16F628 microcontroller and serial to parallel converter chips since the 16F628 doesn’t have 32 outputs.

Talk about life size. The SPIN display is massive and has a nice effect.

“We’ve all seen a train or a car whizzing past us in the night. If it’s close enough and we don’t move our heads rather quickly, we see that its lights appear as horizontal lines instead of moving dots. This is due to a characteristic of our eyes known as Persistence of Vision. A retina is capable of changing the data it sends to the brain only so fast. A quickly moving light appears to be in many places at once. If it’s on continuously, we see a solid line. If it’s flashing, we see a line of dots. This phenomenon can be thought of as the brain having a limited “frame rate”. Movies “work” only because of this limitation. We only think we’re seeing fluid motion around us because the brain is so good at piecing bits of data into continuous images and stories.”

Only one color, but the output looks clear. This site has more information but it loads very slowly…

“Hand pocket LED panel is a board with line of 48 super bright red LEDs controlled by microprocessor circuit. The microprocessor turns on the LEDs to show your image.
The LED panel the size is 280x30mm.
Power supply for the LED panel is 9V battery.
The display of words is carried out two times for one period of oscillations, at a forward and backward movement. It improves word brightness.”

OK this one is a commercial product so I guess it might not be fair to put it up against the others but I want to see more of these around. I am thinking if I knock out a few walls in my living room I should be able to fit it in there. 🙂

” Unlike conventional display which has red, blue and green color elements separated, the “360° LED Display”‘ flying red green and blue LEDs are turned on right at the same spot to create an effective pixel which makes the image perfectly crispy. The “360° LED Display”‘s real pixel has a size as fine as 2.5 by 2.5mm. Crisp and vivid images remain for any viewing distance and guarantee authentic video quality even for spectators close to the display.”

How to make a rotating LED display more cool? Make it into a video game!

“The mechanics is an essential part of this project since it is a mechanically scanned display. The system has basically two parts, one solid platform, and one rotating rotor. The rotor is a bar, with the graphics card in one end, and a balance weight in the other. On the graphics card, a Plexiglas bar is attached, with 16 LEDs (10mm) attached on it. To get a wider viewing angle of the LEDs they have been made rugged with sandpaper.

To get a more stable rotor, the motor is attached and rotating with the rotor, and the axle is mounted at the platform. The motor has an extra long axle, so the three ball bearings, for power supply and communications can fit between the rotor and the platform.”