Wireless video streaming on POV bike display
It took me a few years of fits and starts but I've finally got my DIY persistence of vision bike light to display video! I designed and built the PCB for it and wrote the code for the wifi streaming of video frames with a bit of help from Claude. This was actually one thing I was dreading as I was hitting a wall being burned out on this project. With a little bit of Claude's help in getting the ESP32 wifi stack working It's finally finished! Some tech specs: Using an ESP32 42 LED's per strip, 4 strips total spaced 90 deg apart. Angular resolution of the image is 1 deg so it updates all 168…
In plain words
This is a custom-built bike light that displays video using persistence of vision. The device uses an ESP32 microcontroller, 168 individually addressable LEDs arranged in four strips, and a hall effect sensor to track wheel rotation. Video frames stream wirelessly to the device, which can be served from a phone using a Python server. The result is a spinning display that creates moving images as the wheel rotates, combining embedded hardware design, LED control, and wireless networking.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
It took me a few years of fits and starts but I've finally got my DIY persistence of vision bike light to display video! I designed and built the PCB for it and wrote the code for the wifi streaming of video frames with a bit of help from Claude. This was actually one thing I was dreading as I was hitting a wall being burned out on this project. With a little bit of Claude's help in getting the ESP32 wifi stack working It's finally finished! Some tech specs: Using an ESP32 42 LED's per strip, 4 strips total spaced 90 deg apart. Angular resolution of the image is 1 deg so it updates all 168 LED's , 360 times per rotation. The LED's are SK9822 individually addressable LED's (also known as DotStar from Adafruit). Uses a magnet and hall effect sensor to keep track of rotation speed. The server can be run from a phone and using termux with a python server to serve locally to the esp. I need to periodically spin it up every time it slows down. My video camera shutter speed needs to be slow to show the correct effect otherwise it is either incomplete or it shows too many "frames" in a video frame. Gonna get around to making a blog post at some point to talk more about it in detail!
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