The One and Only ROPOD

The ROPOD is a project I built for EE/CS 53, a microprocessor laboratory class. I started planning the ROPOD 2nd term Frosh year (1994) while taking EE/CS 52. I actually took 53 third term Sophomore year, and built the hardware and wrote very primitive software. I've worked on the software on and off since then, and now have the ROPOD in a pretty much finished state.

ROPOD stands for Rotating Polar Display. The basic idea is that a row of 64 LEDs are spun at around 30 revolutions per second. By turning the LEDs on and off at the appropriate times, I can display any image. The odd thing is that this display, rather than being based on rectangular coordinates like most displays, is be fundamentally based on polar coordinates.

Here's my original design. This is the `Whirling Blades O' Death' model. Beware the large version of this image - it's a 1280 x 1024 JPEG.

Some images of the actual ROPOD: (The laptop in the background is brightred, my 386SLC-25 running Linux. I use brightred to write the ROPOD software and download animations.)

And finally, here is an MPEG-1 movie of the ROPOD in action.