Creating Lissajous Figures from POV

Overview

The project uses the persistence of vision as well as two axes of motion in order to produce Lissajous figures.

Details

In systems where oscillation occurs in more than one direction, interesting curves occur which pertains to the Lissajous figures. Two axes of motion were used to make the display wherein a row of LEDs is contained in the first axis with a back and forth movement of the light. The 1-D LED display was used by the second axis to produce a pendulum on a simple bearing by rocking it back and forth. A hanging file folder frame was used to hold the pendulum up with some electrical tape to make it less slippery along with a wooden dowel. Below this wooden dowel on a couple of skinny bamboo skewers hangs down the LED display. By moving the mass, the pendulum frequency gets finely tunable.

On a small board with 12 blue LEDs, an ATmega168 AVR microcontroller was used for the LED display. To give a nice diffuse surface visible from any angle, the 12 regular blue LEDs were taken and sanded with their anodes being attached to the pins of the ATmega168.