my recent reads..

LEAP#193 PoV LED Shake Stick


This AT89S52-based "shake stick" kit pops up all over the place for a few dollars. I built it and hey, it works great!

But it's not packaged to be easily re-programmed for other messages or graphics. So started my sleuthing.. which turned into a fascinating story.

It seems the kit was originally designed and built as a uni project by Zheng Zhong Xing 兴向荣 (aka zhengzhongxing39) studying Control Technology and Instruments/Principles and Applications at a Chinese University. Reportedly "... soldering was troublesome, with lots of changes and no solid basic skills, so burned out the first board" ;-) But it seems persistence paid off, and ended up commercialising the kit and starting electronics business and taobao store where you can find this kit and many others.

As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Arduino Projects repo on GitHub, including my annotation of the source code and schematic for the shake stick.