Brads Electronic Projects Forum

Did anyone see the Crayola Digital Light Designer? It is basically a POV display with a pen input.
They did a good job. I think it should be hacked.

Man, that is cool!

I am wondering how the pen sensor works though - how does it track where it is?

I didn't know what I was doing when I was first trying it.

You have to press down with the pen. The tip of the pen turns red when you press down and it works pretty good. You can watch the reflection of red in the plastic dome of the POV. It works pretty good but sometimes it is slow.

We had to buy four D batteries for the Dome and the Pen takes batteries too.

Interesting, so the tip of the pen lights up, maybe there is some sort of sensor on the main unit to track where the pen is - or perhaps they use the LED's on the main unit as photo diodes. (I remember doing some experiments with using LED's as sensors a couple of years ago.)