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I actually founded a company some years ago that used this exact technology to make advertising displays. We had 72 RGB LED's on a spinning circuitboard, and mo
by mixmax 18y ago
I actually founded a company some years ago that used this exact technology to make advertising displays. We had 72 RGB LED's on a spinning circuitboard, and modulated the red green and blue so that we were able to create full-color. This was enough to display pictures in reasonable resolution. One of the hard parts was getting power to the circuitboard with the LED's, the standard solution would be a brush of some kind but this proved to be too shortlived and needed a lot of maintenance because it broke. We ended up using some voodo with induction and magnetism so that we sould transfer power wirelessly.
I've long since left the company to go on doing other things, but I still dream of using this technology to make a globe (the spinning circuitboard reaching in an arc from north to southpole and revolving around the north/south pole axis) that would be connected to the Internet so it could show live weather, Google maps, or where your global fleet of submarines are stationed at this very moment. We even developed and patented a touch-sensitive technology to go with the display so that you would have an interface to the globe. (you would probably need to put the rotating part in a glass globe unless you want your hands slapped pretty badly)
If any hardware hackers out there that are interested I might be able to dig up the technology. Won't promise anything though.
- yellowbkpk 18y agoI'd love to hear more about this. I could see induction used to send power, but how would you send data? Zigbee or something similar?
- mixmax 18y agoWe only used induction for power, data was sent with an infrared LED and a photo sensor on each side.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- noonespecial 18y agoA globe like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLygWkHo9nw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLygWkHo9nw
- mixmax 18y agoExactly!! Great find.
- HeyLaughingBoy 18y agoInteresting. Why did brushes break? They can last for hundreds of hours on motors?
- mixmax 18y agoyes, but hundreds of hours isn't enough when you have an advertising display that will presumably run for 24 hours a day. One thousand hours is roughly one month.