Cheapest persistence of vision display with arduino $2

The POV circuit is built on a perfboard with 8 LED and a 595 shift registor, 8 LED, 8 resistors, IR emitter, a light sensor, some wires.

Parts:

Shift registor: http://dipmicro.com/store/74HC595

LEDs: http://dipmicro.com/store/LED5R

Resistors: http://dipmicro.com/store/R2F15-4 These are 150Ohm resistors. You may want some 220OHm and 120Ohm ones in case you want your LEDs dimmer or brighter. I would buy a lot of these registors since they’re cheap by larger quantities and also are needed a lot in projects.

Light sensor: http://dipmicro.com/store/RPT-311PTA49 They don’t even have a spec sheet. From what I found out by trial and error, it is sensitive to infrared as well as visible light. So I painted it black

IR LED: http://dipmicro.com/store/SIR-311STA49

The perfboard is a buck a couple: http://dipmicro.com/store/PCB-UNI7H

I can safely say I spent less than $2 for this project. I was thinking about making a PCB but couldn’t bare the long wait.

Picture:

Download code:

POV_v2