Okay, it’s time to make a realistic Larson Scanner. You may know it as a Cylon Eye from Battlestar Gallactica or the lights on the front of KITT, the car in Knight Rider. It’s a popular project because it looks cool, but I’ve seen (and built) a ton of lousy imitations. What makes the original so interesting is that the bright tracking light leaves a fading tale behind it. That’s a bit more work to implement, but I’m up for the challenge. Update: check out the complete project.
After the break I embedded a video of the Larson Scanner from Knight Rider. You can pause it to get an idea of what’s going on here. The brightest light is always on the leading edge, the rest fade with time.
So my implementation will happen in a couple of stages:
- Write some code to drive a PWM signal on the pins of an AVR microcontroller
- Write some code to automatically fade an LED once the focus has left it
- Write some code to change where the focus is on a row of LEDs
This is just an introduction so check back soon!