The Empire needs you. Join the dark side!
The Interactive Persistence of Vision Globe website, from the School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering team at the University of Leeds, holds the secret to building your personal weapon of mass destruction: the Death Star.
The project was originally launched a few years ago by a MEng student group consisting of Thomas Carpenter, Oliver Peel, Adam Clarkson, and Laurence Bird, with supervision from Craig Evans. It makes use of a ring of RGB LEDs, rotating on an axis at 300rpm, to display an image.
A Raspberry Pi sits within the rotating build, offering HDMI connectivity to allow images to be sent to the LEDs through a decoder.
Images can be sent to the globe from any smart device, allowing the engineer to display a map with their own chosen coordinates, visual temperature readings, etc. This makes the globe useful for marketing and education and entertainment.
For further details on the components used and how the globe was built, access https://povglobe.wordpress.com/system-overview/