pov_gen Page
This is a project to create a message suitable for display on the MiniPOV 3 and related hardware from adafruit industries.
This my attempt at a message generator using Processing. If you haven't tried it yet Processing is a a lot of fun and very useful at the same time. In this program you can create your own message and preview the results on your computer. You can even change the font definitions to suit your own taste. Processing is based on Java and will run on any machine that can run Java.
The Processing part of this project consists of a main program and two support files all in a directory named pov_gen. You should be able to ignore most of these details and just download the archive that suits your OS(either pov_gen.tgz or pov_gen.zip, linked at the bottom of this page). Unload the archive into your Sketchbook directory and you should be able to open it in Processing. The main program is named
The program is easy to use. It is as simple as opening it in Processing and clicking Run. There are a few things you might want to play with. If the width of you display does not suit you you can edit the display_width variable to change its value. That might be needed to make the message easier to see, but the important thing is to display your message. You can change the message by editing my_message. That is all there is to creating your custom message.
The next step is compiling and uploading your message to the MiniPOV hardware. If you have already installed the programs needed to work with MiniPOV this is an easy task. First change to the directory that holds the Processing sketch. That will be something like Sketchbook/pov_gen. There may be some additional directories that you will need to navigate through to find the program directory. When you are there all you need to do is to type the following magic words.
When the Processing sketch runs it creates a file named hex_strings.txt in that directory. that file is used by proc2pov.c to create the program for the MiniPOV hardware. This is a little different then the way ladyada stores the message. She uses a set of binary strings for the the letters. This makes it easier to understand what they look like. This program use a set of hexadecimal strings instead. Processing manages what things look like and it is easier to deal with hex in the Avr-C program.
Your experience may vary. The Makefile that is included works on my Ubuntu machine. You might need to make some changes to suit your hardware. I tried this on a Windows machine and all I needed to change were the parameters that avrdude uses to upload the program to the MiniPOV hardware. You can find working examples for those changes in the file provided with the MiniPOV examples.
After you get this working there are all manner of things that you can tweak. I am sure there more of these then I know. I will point out a couple of things you can try. In the Processing source there are some parameters that control the display you will see on your computer screen. One of these is display_width. It controls the length, from side to side, of the message area on the screen. If you don't like the width of the display try some other values. Another thing to play with is the character map that controls what the message looks like. That is contained in a Processing file named char_data.pde. It will show up in the Processing program as a tab named 'char_data'. The characters are in a string array named letter_stub. Each string holds all of the information to draw one letter. The strings are a series of values separated by some delimiters. The first split is between a character and the information needed to display it. It looks like this A;00000111,11111000,11001000,11111000,00000111,00000000 where the character is A and everything past the semicolon is the display map. The display map also splits down to a series of values separated by commas. The individual values each contain the information for one vertical slice of the character. The '1's mean the LED is on and the '0's that it is off, just like you find in ladyada's code. There are all kinds of things you can do with this. Things making the letters look different, draw some letters upside down or sideways, or even make your own letters.
This Sketch is released to the Public Domain without any support or warranty attached. If you find fun things to do with this work please tell me what you are doing. I hope my ideas help to move your's along to a better place. I know that has been the case for the people who have let me learn about their ideas. This uses 'things' from ladyada, processing. Have fun!