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Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display

https://benholmen.com/blog/kilopixel/

benholmen · 11 months ago

I built the world's most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it. It draws a single pixel at a time and takes 30-60 minutes to complete a single image. Anyone can participate in the project by voting for the next image to be drawn, and submitting images.

https://kilopx.com/

73 comments

  • joetannenbaum · 11 months ago

    Incredible write-up and a hugely ambitious project. Thanks for sharing!

    • aarondf · 11 months ago

      This has to be the the most expensive cost per pixel display I've ever seen. And I've never loved a display more. This is absurd in the best possible way

      • benholmen · 11 months ago

        I don't think I want to think of the actual cost per pixel - especially the cost of my time! I have deliberately avoided accounting the final cost

        • zahlman · 11 months ago

          For what it's worth, dollar stores typically sell wooden cubes for arts & crafts purposes (board game designers also like them for prototyping) in bags that work out to a few cents per piece. I guess they're quite a bit smaller than what you ended up using, though. And of course that doesn't account for the frame or the control mechanism. (And now you have me trying to think of more robust ways to turn the pixels...)

          • ralferoo · 11 months ago

            When I was a kid, my school had several "1 litre" tubs of 1cm³ wooden cubes so that we could stack them 10x10x10. This would have been very early 80s UK.

            Just googled and I found some on Shein with 200 cubes for £2.50. They also have 2cm sized ones at £1.31 for 20 cubes and 4cm ones for £1.88 for 4 cubes.

            You'd still have to drill holes in them all, but I wonder if a different solution might be possible - for instance holes in the wooden strips between the rows of cubes that are slightly wider than screws that hold the cubes suspended from the strips. If they weren't too tight, the cube could rotate freely. But maybe just drilling holes using a CNC would easier (and potentially you could drill all the holes on a flat plane of wood before cutting up into cubes).

          • lemonberry · 11 months ago

            But the experience and feeling of building it... priceless. Money can't account for that.

          • Rexxar · 11 months ago

            And absolutely no energy consumption when you don't change the image.

            • kulahan · 11 months ago

              Move over, e-ink displays. A new king is in town.

              • wkat4242 · 11 months ago

                This will be my new Kindle!

                Only drawback is having to hire a C130 if I want to take it on a trip with me :')

              • joemi · 11 months ago

                It was directly inspired by e-ink, after all.

              • zer00eyz · 11 months ago

                > I created a reciprocating poking mechanism that uses a flexible glue stick

                With the most cost effective and creative "wear item" ever.

                • benholmen · 11 months ago

                  I was extremely pleased with that discovery! Needed something a little grippy, pliable yet firm, and disposable.

                    • sleepybrett · 11 months ago

                      I came to post about Rosin's work as well. I personally love that he uses clever lighting and angles to create the shading for his pixels instead of just painting one side. It makes it feel like a mirror, all one material like a magic wallhanging.

                      That said the one I experienced was an earlier work had was fully driven by hobby servos (or something that sounded very much like them) and when you get even one of those going it's loud as hell. I didn't get to look at the construction too closely and this was many years ago. I expect that he did some kind of sound dampening because it wasn't as.. deafening as I expected. But it still kinda 'took me out of it' a bit.

                  • mosdl · 11 months ago

                    Really cool and it would totally work for a restaurant/coffee shop.

                    • benholmen · 11 months ago

                      I think I might put this in my friend's coffee shop but I'll restrict access to people in the coffee shop. Not going to let the internet get a hold of that.

                      In addition to the user-controlled modes I also have ambient modes. My favorite is a clock that struggles to draw the current time because it takes too long

                      • Mabusto · 11 months ago

                        You gotta do the classic bouncing logo from The Office.

                        • benholmen · 11 months ago

                          Genius. I'll do this when I install it in my Zoom background and take it off the internet

                    • cinntaile · 11 months ago

                      There was a fish project on here a few days ago that also had to deal with uh... adverserial images and it was (mostly?) solved by training a neural net to detect those.

                      • benholmen · 11 months ago

                        TTFP will surely be < 1 day

                        • benholmen · 11 months ago

                          It was indeed < 1 day

                        • rightbyte · 11 months ago

                          The constraint that the picture needed to be a right facing fish made it somewhat easier though. Now I need to paint another fish...

                        • xnx · 11 months ago

                          Wow. Impressive. I would never have guessed you'd use a Vanna White / Wheel of Fortune turning method.

                          • benholmen · 11 months ago

                            That it, the method will forever be called the Vanna White Method

                            • mjwhansen · 11 months ago

                              Ben, can I get a vowel, please?

                              • benholmen · 11 months ago

                                $250!

                          • explodingwaffle · 11 months ago

                            This is awesome! Just so you know, you are legally obligated to do Bad Apple when interest dies down.

                            • alnwlsn · 11 months ago

                              By my estimation, it would only take 1/3 of a year to render

                              • benholmen · 11 months ago

                                y'know, I've been excited / feared that Bad Apple would show up. The good news is a lot of frames would probably just be a few pixels to change from the previous frame, so some might draw really quickly.

                                Basically you want to avoid keyframes on this thing, they'll kill you

                          • eclipticplane · 11 months ago

                            Amazing.

                            Could turn this into a 4 color display at the cost of drawing speed?

                            • benholmen · 11 months ago

                              Yes! I have an RGB sensor that could handle that, but it's more bulky than the simple IR on/off sensor I went with. Could be four colors, or four shades of a color.

                              • stavros · 11 months ago

                                Why do you need a sensor? Don't you always know what face each cube is showing?

                            • xpe · 11 months ago

                              You could order the presentation of a set of images by some distance metric :)

                              - naively: Levenshtein

                              - better: real world edit time based on a model of the display : probably dominated by XY travel distance

                              • benholmen · 11 months ago

                                Oh I kinda love the idea of drawing the next one based on the pixel diff! Would be fun to game that queue.

                              • munificent · 11 months ago

                                I was wondering about the algorithm to drive the plotter and update pixels, which ties into this.

                                Given the current image being shown and the next image, you (presumably) want to plot the pixels of the next image as quickly as possible. I believe the optimal algorithm is:

                                1. Calculate the set of pixels that are changed between the current and next image.

                                2. Find the shortest path from the plotter's current position through each of those pixels. I believe breadth-first search (O(n)) is sufficient here.

                                Running this on all potential upcoming images and choosing the one with the lowest total path cost would do what you propose under "better".

                              • ashleyhindle · 11 months ago

                                This is so great

                                How is it volume wise while it's working? Manageable or painful?

                                • benholmen · 11 months ago

                                  Pretty quiet! I spent some time figuring out how to make sure the stepper motors don't whine (the answer is microstepping and decent motor controllers). The pixel turning is very quiet unless it misses slightly, then it makes a clunk.

                                • xpe · 11 months ago

                                  Another idea: have the cubes point an edge straight forward (instead of a face). Then if each cube has two adjacent dark sides and two adjacent light sides, one could setup two ‘simultaneous’ images: one viewed from the left at 45° and another viewed from the right. (Each pixel would have four possibilities.)

                                  • boothby · 11 months ago

                                    Similarly, the camera could stay face-on and double the pixel count with largely the same hardware.

                                    • zahlman · 11 months ago

                                      For this to work, you'd want two adjacent faces painted, rather than opposite faces being painted, which seems to be how they're currently done (unless they only have one face painted?). Then the four possible rotations would allow for each possible pixel-pair. (The cubes could perhaps instead be squat rectangular prisms, to correct the aspect ratio, too.)

                                      • boothby · 11 months ago

                                        Likewise, if you generalize to 3-face array, you'd need an octagonal unit painted in a 2^3 debruijn sequence...

                                        • zahlman · 11 months ago

                                          ... But that's as far as you could take it, since 16-gons would show at least 7 faces while only having an encoding for 4.

                                          I also thought of using hexagonal prisms, showing two faces at a time in paired colours but using three colours. These would also need much less clearance in order to rotate freely, compared to face-on cubes.

                                    • robocat · 11 months ago

                                      Or paint the 4 faces RGBK or CYMK or to get a colour display?

                                    • boredpudding · 11 months ago

                                      This used to exist! I remember a video about this large analog billboard in Amsterdam (?).

                                      Unfortunately I can't find the video. Will edit if I do (or anybody else finds it first).

                                        • benholmen · 11 months ago

                                          Rozin was a direct influence on me! Seeing his stuff ~10 years ago got me thinking about unorthodox displays.

                                          • boredpudding · 11 months ago

                                            That's a very good one, but in my case it was a huge billboard that was advertising movies and stuff.

                                            It had cubes in different colors so from further away it would look like an image.

                                        • fentonc · 11 months ago

                                          Awesome project! I built a somewhat similar 30-pixel display: https://www.chrisfenton.com/the-pixelweaver/

                                          Mine was entirely mechanical (driven by punch cards and a hand-crank), and changed all of the pixels in parallel, but a lot of the mechanism development looked extremely familiar to me.

                                          • benholmen · 11 months ago

                                            This is incredible! I can appreciate how much work it took to make this happen. Well done!

                                            I was recently in the presence of some linotype machines from the 1800s and it's so good to be humbled by the achievements of people who came before us. That machine was so complex, I could barely begin to figure out how to manufacture one. Your discussion of looms reminds me of that!

                                            • knome · 11 months ago

                                              If you enjoy linotype machines, I'll suggest you watch 'Farewell ETAOIN SHRDLU', a documentary on the last night the New York Times ran its hot press system

                                          • cgriswald · 11 months ago

                                            This is great, but you can get even more impractical: build a framebuffer!

                                            • joshmanders · 11 months ago

                                              This is awesome, Ben!

                                              • derefr · 11 months ago

                                                Speaking of "alternatives to e-ink for a zero-power-use-when-not-updating dot-matrix display"...

                                                Has there ever been designed a "display" that is just a thermal printer hidden in one end of a box, and a take-up spool + tensioning spring hidden on the other end, such that the "display" is then a continuous thermal paper "scroll" stretched across the box behind [UV-protective!] glass, that can be "refreshed" by printing a new full-width image to the thermal printer?

                                                • cgriswald · 11 months ago

                                                  Allow me to correct you: Some fax machines use thermal paper so your display can be at least 8.5".

                                                  • tristor · 11 months ago

                                                    Ooh, I like this idea. You could also use the box structure to stretch the display so it has 4 sides if you build the mechanism correctly, which means as you refresh the image on the "primary" display it moves the other images to the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary displays before it gets taken up. You can use tensioned rollers at each corner hidden by the frame if you plan for a gap for "bezel".

                                                    • daotoad · 11 months ago

                                                      If you wanted to take this a little further, you could cover the "display" with heat erasable ink like is used in a Pilot Frixion pens.

                                                      This ink is interesting in that it fades when heated (60 C), but darkens when cooled (-10 C). In between those temperatures it is stable.

                                                      Thus you could have one loop that is continuously reused. Not sure how many cycles you can get before the ink degrades.

                                                      • gmueckl · 11 months ago

                                                        I like that idea. The printing process should probably be inverted: cool the paper as a whole to darken the whole sheet amd use a small heating coil to erase.

                                                        • turtlebits · 11 months ago

                                                          Not sure if you can call it a display if you have to throw it away to change an image.

                                                          • Maxion · 11 months ago

                                                            Look into ticker tape, and dot matrix printing, this is how early computer displays worked.

                                                          • mjwhansen · 11 months ago

                                                            Such a cool project, Ben!

                                                            • saltcured · 11 months ago

                                                              I keep trying to imagine "faster" variations.

                                                              What about some system to shoot wooden spheres into a tube or channel for each scan line, selectively feeding different color spheres. Some combination of gravity or pneumatics to drive it. So a scan line would flush out one end and refill from the other. Then scale it up to a stadium size unit with bowling ball pixels.

                                                              I guess a challenging part would be proper timing to recycling the colors back into their appropriate supply channels. And also introducing some kind of damping to quiet it down and reduce the wear and tear on the pixels.

                                                              On the other extreme, you could go active matrix and have blocks that simply rotate in place to show different face colors based on some solenoid/servo action.

                                                                • benholmen · 11 months ago

                                                                  I love this project! I was well on my way with the kilopixel when I find him or it would have given me pause.

                                                                  He's optimizing for some very different things though.

                                                              • jstanley · 11 months ago

                                                                Hah, cool, I had an idea for a similar project (although I'm not crazy enough to make 1000 pixels, or a robot to turn them for me). But I got as far as making a JavaScript simulation and realised I couldn't be bothered manually turning the beads https://incoherency.co.uk/beadboard/

                                                                • re · 11 months ago

                                                                  Really cool! I just watched it finish "cat saying 'hi'". It doesn't look like any new posts have shown up on @kilopx.com on Bluesky for the last 9 days though.

                                                                  A few suggestions for improvements:

                                                                  - After completing a submission, move the "pen" out of the way as much as possible to get a clean photo of the completed art before moving onto the next submission.

                                                                  - On the website, show attribution for the currently in-progress submission.

                                                                  - On the website, have a "history" gallery for completed submissions. It looks like pending submissions have permalinks that say "Timelapse will be available after this is drawn", but there's no way to discover permalinks for completed submissions (or the in-progress one).

                                                                  • rexreed · 11 months ago

                                                                    This is cool. I wonder, as you were iterating on the design and development, why didn't you start with a very small grid (10x10) to validate or test different options for their practicality and operation before scaling up to the 1000 pixel versions? It might have saved a lot of time and money, but maybe small scale tests aren't sufficient to work out the kinks?

                                                                    • benholmen · 11 months ago

                                                                      Definitely! I scaled up to 3×21 to validate some things and immediately broke a lot of what I thought would work.

                                                                      I tested a 1×10 grid of the wooden pixels to try out some different variations as well.

                                                                      • CodeWriter23 · 11 months ago

                                                                        Best practical application of glue stick ever!

                                                                        • alexandersix_ · 11 months ago

                                                                          When you commit, you really commit. What an incredibly cool project.

                                                                          I need to go find some corgi art to upload next!

                                                                          • yubblegum · 11 months ago

                                                                            It may be "ridiculous" but the fact remains that you are (clearly) awesome.

                                                                            • hugs · 11 months ago

                                                                              I'm working on something similar, but 3D and faster motion: PinThing / TAP (Tangible Actuated Pins) [1]

                                                                              "Motorized pin art display" is what i'm going for...

                                                                              The problem with passion projects: Progress is never as much or as fast as I want, though! Hard to find the people who want to throw money at things like this and/or buy them. And anything mechanical gets complicated and expensive very quickly. But it's so much fun and a great way to learn and apply so many new skills: laser cutting, 3D printing, CNC milling, circuit design, embedded programming, etc.

                                                                              [1]: https://youtu.be/tx4W3ZDA_Vg

                                                                              • benholmen · 11 months ago

                                                                                I love this so much! Will it be mounted so that gravity makes the pins fall back down or do you need a retraction mechanism?

                                                                                • hugs · 11 months ago

                                                                                  it's all motorized, so it can be wall-mounted or table-top mounted.

                                                                                • bl0rg · 11 months ago

                                                                                  Coincidentally that's also the framerate of the YouTube stream main camera (please fix OP)

                                                                                  • benholmen · 11 months ago

                                                                                    I think the issue is that I'm streaming to disk with ffmpeg and recording at 5 fps to save space. OBS must be locked to the same frame rate since it's sharing the webcam?

                                                                                    My original concept included two webcams, one for OBS, one for ffmpeg. Guess I should have gone with that!

                                                                                  • lemonberry · 11 months ago

                                                                                    This is really interesting. Have you read Amber Case's book, "Calm Technology"? If so would you recommend.

                                                                                • yunusabd · 11 months ago

                                                                                  Very nice!

                                                                                  > I have a mechanism to quickly delete problem submissions.

                                                                                  Did you build a male genitalia swastika classifier like the fish guy? (What a sentence)

                                                                                  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44719222

                                                                                  • tlaverdure · 11 months ago

                                                                                    This has been a fun project to follow. Great job, Ben! Hope I'll see one of these in a coffee shop, mall, or airport one day.

                                                                                    • dpe82 · 11 months ago

                                                                                      Super cool project! I see the map on the wall.. where in Wisconsin are ya?

                                                                                      • benholmen · 11 months ago

                                                                                        Western Wisconsin, Eau Claire. It's beautiful here

                                                                                      • TrnsltLife · 11 months ago

                                                                                        Very cool. I loved reading your write-up. It reminded me of something I'd read in a steampunk novel once. I had to Google it to get the details. It's the kinotrope from Gibson & Sterling's Difference Engine.

                                                                                        I found a blog post about it and someone who made one with a servo for each pixel. Now that would be expensive!

                                                                                        https://differencing.blogspot.com/2010/04/kinotrope-clackers...

                                                                                      • antithesizer · 11 months ago

                                                                                        Evil triumphs when good people lean into their hobbies.

                                                                                          • _giorgio_ · 11 months ago

                                                                                            It reminds me of this

                                                                                            In Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar," the "Interstellar library" refers to the tesseract, a 5-dimensional space within a black hole, visualized as a bookshelf. This structure is not a physical library but rather a construct created by future humans, allowing Cooper to interact with the past and relay gravity data to his daughter, Murph.

                                                                                            • donatj · 11 months ago

                                                                                              Oh hey, I know you IRL from the PHP meetups! I've been watching this develop on Bluesky!

                                                                                              Super cool project.

                                                                                              • benholmen · 11 months ago

                                                                                                Hey, I know you! Thanks for checking it out, looking forward to seeing you at the next PHP×MSP!

                                                                                              • bobafett-9902 · 11 months ago

                                                                                                this is so cool! add some Mark Rober build type music montage and this is a viral video on YT

                                                                                                  • joemi · 11 months ago

                                                                                                    This is pretty cool as-is, but I can't help but try to think up ways to increase the speed. (Not the point, I know.) I feel like it should be able to do a whole column pretty quickly with some optimizations. If the device that turns a block could do so without needing x-axis alignment to change, then you could do a whole column pretty quickly. Or perhaps it'd be better to do rows instead of columns, since the y-axis alignment shouldn't need to change with the current device. As for the block-turning device itself, I think some sort of thing that rotates would speed things up since you wouldn't need to reset, I think. I bet a manufacturing automation specialist could get this thing cruising...

                                                                                                    BTW I love that you initially went with a very direct e-ink analog with the balls!

                                                                                                    • benholmen · 11 months ago

                                                                                                      Thanks for thinking through it! I've found that moving left-right is a little noisier and has a little vibration - up-down is smoother. However, it's not that noisy and it'd be fun to experiment with different algorithms for finding the next pixel.

                                                                                                      • leoc · 11 months ago

                                                                                                        If you had a rotating mechanism which allows slip then you could have rotor shafts which rotate all the blocks in a column while braking mechanisms prevent all the blocks in a given row from moving. Or you could have both rotor rows and rotor columns if you implement a rough mechanical equivalent of the hysteresis systems of ferrite-core memory. Or (I think GistNoesis suggested something similar https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44794092 ) if you hide a neodymium permanent magnet just under one corner of each of the blocks you could use a pair of electromagnets behind that block to pull the block from either orientation into the other, almost a solid-state solution apart from the axle the block would rotate on and potentially one which could set the entire display at once.

                                                                                                      • jamestimmins · 11 months ago

                                                                                                        This is really exciting. The world of non-electronic computer interfaces has a ton of potential, so I love seeing people build them and write up their experiences.

                                                                                                        Congrats OP!

                                                                                                        • stavros · 11 months ago

                                                                                                          This is fantastic, great job! I loved reading about the process, and it's the sort of pointless thing I really enjoy seeing done to perfection.

                                                                                                          • crimony · 11 months ago

                                                                                                            You have four sides to each pixel cube, have you considered black, white and two grey levels?

                                                                                                            • christophilus · 11 months ago

                                                                                                              Rad. The occasional crazy project like this is what keeps me on HN.

                                                                                                              • fitsumbelay · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                this is what I come to hacker news for. this. so awesome

                                                                                                                • mappu · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                  There's a full colour one of these in the entrance hallway inside the Berlin Technikmuseum, near the Zuse exhibit - there are 12800 cubes, each with 4 colours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfWFLnsy6QA

                                                                                                                  • 0x696C6961 · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                    But can it run doom?

                                                                                                                    • rudasn · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                      Super cool and congrats for getting it done. You should be proud, even just for persisting all these years.

                                                                                                                      Also, I'm surprised "All your base are belong to us!" hasn't been submitted yet!

                                                                                                                        • shiandow · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                          Apparently I can't watch tge feed without logging in, that's kind of annoying.

                                                                                                                            • zakirullah49 · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                              Come on

                                                                                                                              • pstuart · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                I have to confess I only skimmed it, but it seems that if the choice is to rotate an object, then using a simple flap on an axis would be both cheaper and likely faster (less mass to move). I realize that efficiency was not a goal, but it does align with the pricing issue.

                                                                                                                                • mrheosuper · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                  it's mandatory to play bad apple on it.

                                                                                                                                  • mister_mort · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                    Opening the site and immediately seeing it drawing a frame from Bad Apple was amusing, I suspect someone will attempt to automate submissions of frames from that video at some point.

                                                                                                                                    • aidenn0 · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                      I wonder how hard it would be to get two consecutive images that are pixel-wise inverses of each other in the queue; maximum rendering time!

                                                                                                                                      • GistNoesis · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                        As an experiment, I just spray painted 66 magnet spheres in half, to make a physical display in 5 minutes. I manually rotated the sphere into position and it holds the image.

                                                                                                                                        https://gist.github.com/unrealwill/b8f585758880009113805bd95...

                                                                                                                                        Small spherical magnets are quite cheap.

                                                                                                                                        There is hope of physically moving them if you put each sphere into a 3d-printed countersink hole over some metal sheet (so that the magnet is hold in place against the plastic), moving a electro-magnet head over you can rotate the magnet, like a scaled-up version of a 2d magnetic tape.

                                                                                                                                        You may even create a Ising model if you put magnets too close to each other.

                                                                                                                                        • curiosity42 · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                          Absolutely wild this came up today. Just last night I was fiddling with my kids 'magnetic ball board', bought at SF MoMA, and thinking that it could be turned into a cool display by loading a small magnet on the 3-d printer gantry.

                                                                                                                                          • wraptile · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                            There's always something new and novel in each mechanical display projects. Love reading these!

                                                                                                                                            • seltzered_ · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                              Very neat to see! I've been wanting to make one for ~15 years, one approach to making one would be inspired by a wooden binary counter where each 'pixel' has a gravity latch that rolls out when on one side and triggers a flip for the next adjacent pixel: https://youtu.be/zELAfmp3fXY

                                                                                                                                              Also worth noting this art project: http://breakfastny.com/dot-screen

                                                                                                                                              • ltbarcly3 · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                Incredibly cool, but how is there not a single video on the page!?

                                                                                                                                                • dripdrapdroop · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                  I wish everything in the world was like this.

                                                                                                                                                  • bubblebeard · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                    It’s great to see someone doing something just for the love of doing it. We so often get wrapped up in reaching a goal we forget the journey is what matters most. The curiosity and will to learn new things. I think this project reflects this quite well, and bravo on this amazing achievement. It’s seriously badass.

                                                                                                                                                    • dan00 · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                      That's absolutely useless and that's great!

                                                                                                                                                      • enopod_ · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                        Ben, the arm seems to be misaligned, it is punching into the shelfes!

                                                                                                                                                        • wkat4242 · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                          I don't see a live view on kilopx.com? That's a bit disappointing.

                                                                                                                                                          Edit: Oops there is, it was an issue on my side.

                                                                                                                                                          • rasguanabana · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                            There is a live view, but it looks like the machine has broken down

                                                                                                                                                            • wkat4242 · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                              Oh yes I see it's a YouTube embed, I had those blocked sorry

                                                                                                                                                              • benholmen · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                                I had some down time when the Y axis stepper motor managed to unplug itself overnight!

                                                                                                                                                              • dandaka · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                                Why is the pen in front and not behind the display? It would allow for a clear view; now it is obstructed.

                                                                                                                                                                • GypsyKing716 · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                                  Sounds like a huge waste of time.

                                                                                                                                                                  • CommenterPerson · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                                    This is very cool. I might have the skills to replicate this but would never be able to accomplish it. My brain is warped .. to get motivated, I need the end result to be of some tangible value. Pure fun doesn't work for me, sadly. I am also unable to go and learn something just for the sake of learning.

                                                                                                                                                                    Just an aside, an I realize efficiency is NOT a metric for your fabulous display .. here is another interesting mechanism. Maybe one could build a 10K or 100K display with this?:

                                                                                                                                                                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-flap_display

                                                                                                                                                                    • benholmen · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                                      Oh yeah I love split flaps! Even considered them for this project but they're cost prohibitive and that idea is already out there.

                                                                                                                                                                      The sound those things make is just perfect.

                                                                                                                                                                    • paulmooreparks · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                                      I'd love to see Conway's Game of Life on this thing.

                                                                                                                                                                      • Ayushmishra23 · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                                        make a youtube video

                                                                                                                                                                          • yb0000 · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                                            That's really a beautiful art - great work!!!

                                                                                                                                                                            • HexTan · 11 months ago

                                                                                                                                                                              so you've literally created the world's first wooden display?