Persistence of vision is the phenomenon of the eye by which an afterimage is thought to persist for approximately one twenty-fifth of a second on the retina.

A class of display device described as “POV” is one that composes an image by displaying one spatial portion at a time in rapid succession (for example, one column of pixels every few milliseconds). A 2 dimensional POV display is often accomplished by means of rapidly moving a single row of LEDs along a linear or circular path.

To demonstrate a POV device, I have published two videos in Youtube, showing the process of building a Revolution Education ‘s AXE135. AXE135 consists of a Picaxe-20M that can be programmed with text that is displayed in a column of LEDs. Due to limitations of RAM memory of Picaxe-20M, images can’t be programmed, only short text.

POV kit AXE135

The videos can be viewed below.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Try building a POV device. You will enjoy it!