An interview with the creator of the LumaYo

Yo-Yo Videos
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I chatted with Louis Dodge about the LumaYo, an ultrabright LED yo-yo that’s on Kickstarter now. You can watch the video here:

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I was hoping this would do spinning LED designs and stuff but just changing colors isn’t that interesting IMO.

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Any reason why he didn’t go this route @DocPop? I know yo-yos spin CRAZY fast compared to bike wheels so maybe that doesn’t work…

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Hello, this is Louis Dodge, creator of the Lumayo. What you are talking about is called persistence of vision and it is something I am already working on. The issue is I can only fit 6-8 LEDs in the width of a yoyo. If you watched the video, you will see that I mentioned making one with a strip across. It’s difficult to make a 6 pixel design. The refresh rate is also not fast enough. There is a new strip that just came out last month that allows me to fit 16 LEDs across the width of the yoyo and I already have several of these strips at home for testing. I am sorry you think just changing colors is not interesting. The vast majority of people who see the LumaYo in person think otherwise. I am teaching myself all of this from scratch. I also have many other ideas including using Bluetooth on your phone to change patterns on the yoyo. It’s one thing to come up with these ideas and another thing to actually make them happen. I am just one guy literally working in my basement. I don’t have a team of engineers working on this.

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Here is another version of the LumaYo with LEDs across the width. After I made this version with a line of LEDs, one of the most common things people would say to me is ‘that’s cool, but why don’t you make it a circle?’. So now I’ve made it a circle and people are saying it should be a line again, so I’m to the point where I’m starting to care less what people think and I’m going to make what I think is cool :slight_smile:

As you can see in the video, the led refresh rate of 800hz was not fast enough to make pov designs. That was 4 years ago. Now I already have newer LEDs which have a 20khz refresh rate and im trying them out, but they still might not be fast enough because yoyos spin very fast.

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Yeah I wondered if that would be the case!

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