Our friends at Adafruit just mailed me something remarkably cool. Click the picture to visit their project pages and learn how to do this yourself.
Sing along: "And it burns, burns, burns..."
The picture you see above is the result of a Raspberry Pi persistance of vision (POV) project similar to the Magic Wand we featured here a few weeks back, where moving lights are photographed at a slow shutter speed to produce a still image. This one’s more sophisticated and requires a bit more kit (a 3-colour LED rope, hula hoop and bicycle in particular – you can buy all the electronics you’ll need to make your own, including the LED rope, from Adafruit, but you’re on your own for the hula hoop and the bike) – and the results are outstanding. There are instructions and code at Adafruit’s project pages, along with some more pictures.
A python drawn using Python
Phillip Burgess, who put the whole thing together, says: “Total project time, starting from zero Python experience to having a working demo, photographs and a tutorial, was about two days.” Brilliant stuff.
On a related note, Limor “LadyAda” Fried, the founder of Adafruit, is currently up for Entrepreneur Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year award. Please head over and vote for her; she’s doing simply amazing things for electronics, hacker and maker education, and we’re very proud to know her.
