Arduino and LEDs Transform Your Fan into a Video Game Display

Back in 2012 Irish video game designer Terry Cavanagh released his smash hit Super Hexagon to the world and four years later, it’s still highly favored among gamers today. The game is still available for most platforms including desktops and mobile devices, however for a more immersive venture, fans should check out Alejandro J. Cura’s POV version entitled Super Ventilagon.

In his own words, Alejandro says Super Ventilagon is a blatant rip-off of the original, and it is, but stuffing it into a tiny Arduino Nano and employing a fan as a POV display is all his idea and is even more addicting than the original. To create the display, Alejandro and some friends literally taped the loaded Nano to a fan blade along with LED strips mounted onto a custom-printed circuit board.

To get the display to create the appearance of solid objects and movement, the team employed a Hall effect sensor, which measures the rotational speed of the fan, thus allowing the LEDs to blink in time with the rotation thereby creating the moving spherical maze and red character.

Alejandro unveiled his Super Ventilagon last year at Casa Abasto in Buenos Aries and was instantly a hit with patrons. For those interested in building their own, Alejandro uploaded the open-source code and schematics on GitHub found here.