A few years ago I saw a video on Youtube for a car wheel light that displayed a message as the wheel rotated. I have seen this same method used on LED lights for bicycle wheels. It was a row of LEDs that were synchronized to the rotation, and as the wheel rotated a few degrees, the LEDs would display the column of a many columned display. As the wheel advanced, the persistence of vision created the message around the perimeter of the wheel. Later I went to Radio Shack and they were selling a small, hand held, battery powered fan with a row of LEDs on one of the blades. When you pressed the button, it displayed a message. The salesdroid demoed it for me: it said <expletive> Radio Shack!
The software somehow senses when the blade passes a certain point so it can begin to display the message. The rest is just turning the LEDs off and on in the right order and time.
Aki said he was aware of this and thought about including it in his projects. I was discussing the wheel lights and fan above with the idea that it might be possible to use it in the Wave JT. I thought about how one would mount a small device onto a rotating wheel, but it seems a little bit too complicated for the Wave JT since there are no mounting holes. I later thought about it and I figure that it might be a lot easier to use an arm wave. Like when the button is released there is a burst of LED activity that’s the columns for a few characters being displayed. If the Wave JT is waved – no pun intended – the few characters would appear in the air. This is just enough to display some initial information that would indicate the state of the Wave JT. It’s not a lot but enough to help communicate what’s going on. Two digits can give us the item in a list of a hundred different states of the device. There are other ways to do this. The eight LED could be flashed in two ‘digits’, from 1 1 to 8 8. Zero doesn’t show, and the higher numbers are more difficult to count correctly and may require longer to display.