LED Persistence of Vision Display for Teal Sport Drone by gchristopher

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

Persistence of Vision LED Strip Display Mounts + Parametric and Printable Drone Case + LED Control Circuit for the Teal Sport Drone
I'm publishing this thing before I've finalized several details, because a couple of the files I've made might be a nice starting point for someone else to make a top case mod, and there's enough time left that they might get to make use of them. :)
You know what'd go great with a crazy fast drone? Adding a high-speed LED Persistence-of-Vision display! Turn it into a ballistic neon skywriter.
With the right speed combinations, you could flash pictures of your team logo, your sponsors, or, uh, a picture of your cat?
Since it's a drop in stock-like cover for the Teal Sport, you could swap in the POV LED mount for exhibitions, warmup runs, or whatever else you do with an absurdly fast flying machine. Rep your team. Or your cat.
Or just set it to a random color pattern and watch it go.
For a drone this small and carefully tuned, there will be a performance hit, but center of mass should be preserved, and the extra parts are pretty thin and light.
This was designed with help from Makersaurus Rex. Here's a video of the helpers testing a print with an LED strip: https://youtu.be/fjHQqzrXjrc . You can read the story of how dinosaurs got a printer here.
Changes for this project are tracked at Github.
Note: video and pictures were taken using a NeoPixel strip, which have a slower PWM and won't be as good for persistence of vision display as the DotStars, explained below. But they're what I already had and get the eye-searing point across. Seriously, these things are blinding and I'm considering printing a diffuser out of clear filament. The LED holder strip is sized by default to hold a DotStar strip with the weather stripping still attached, but will adjust to fit different LED strip sizes by changing the relevant parameters.
Current Progress:
It's pretty much done! There's a library of OpenSCAD shapes anyone can use (why does everyone just post .stl's and not indlude their design files?) and a version with a mix of procedurally generated and hand-tuned supports that should make the final product very printable.
Reviews:

"That is going to be an AMAZING future-tron-air-manta-ray thing."
Totally unbiased volunteer design review committee member.
"This looks very cool. How are your job applications coming along?"
My Mom.