From Trash to Flash
James Brown's Fibrovisor turns a dollar store fiber-optic wand into a tiny, programmable RGB display with a Raspberry Pi and an LED matrix.
With a dash of creativity, just about anything can be turned into a project that is beautiful, unexpected, or thought-provoking. James Brown’s latest creation, The Fibrovisor, is all three. And after seeing The Fibrovisor, you may never look at cheap dollar store finds the same way again. What may seem like junk at first blush could turn out to be a diamond in the rough after it has been given some TLC.
The Fibrovisor is a tiny fiber-optic display, which sounds like cutting-edge technology, but it is actually made from a fiber-optic wand found at a dollar store. These wands normally have a single source of light that shines through a bundle of optical fibers that are allowed to move freely at one end, resulting in some cool effects when moved about. But rather than having a single source of light, Brown decided to provide each fiber with its own source of RGB light to turn the wand into a programmable display.
Perhaps the hardest part of this project was getting a handle on all the individual optical fibers. After doing some sanding and polishing, Brown teased apart all of the fibers and fixed them in a set of cable organizers. The display and the cable organizers were then attached to a stand.
This left the issue of lighting up each individual pixel on the display. For this purpose, an RGB LED matrix, driven by a Raspberry Pi, was used to shine light through each fiber. In order to do anything more than a random light show, each fiber would need to be mapped to a specific pixel on the LED matrix. This was accomplished by lighting the pixels one at a time, then using OpenCV to record the position on the fiber-optic display that was illuminated.
By using those mappings, any arbitrary image can be shown on the display. Brown showed that the mapping code is capable of updating the display at a blistering 90,000 frames per second, although it has a very low resolution, so that is not entirely surprising.
Brown demonstrated the display by showing off a moving, blinking eye, which is just about the perfect choice for a small, round display such as this. Given the low resolution, The Fibrovisor is not really useful as anything more than a toy, but it makes one heck of a cool toy. Be sure to check out the video below — this project is one that you really have to see in action to fully appreciate how cool it is.