Voltlog #15 – Kit Assembly LED Rotating Persistence of Vision Kit

The assembly of this LED persistence of vision kit started well but it soon went bad because of poor design and lack of instructions. There is no documentation on how to assemble the mechanical parts so you have to figure that out yourself. There is no mention or pictures of how the LED’s should be soldered and to my surprise they need to be soldered on the edge of the PCB. There is no information on how to load the firmware or custom text patterns. After some research I did manage to find a chinese app which is supposed to work with this kit but I had no success in writing/uploading anything to the microcontroller.

I even spent an hour or so with google translate and, translated to english most of the buttons and messages in the app.

At this point I’m not sure if my problem is in the hardware(unlikely) or if I need to program the microcontroller, or if the microcontroller has some firmware and I just need to upload a custom display pattern using that chinese app.

Too much time & effort has been wasted so I’m not going to follow this anymore. My recommendation: don’t buy this kit unless you have too much free time and you enjoy solving complicated (chinese) problems.