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.
Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display
121–130 of 151 posts
Re: Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display
#122I'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 f…
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?
it's all motorized, so it can be wall-mounted or table-top mounted.
Re: Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display
#123There's always something new and novel in each mechanical display projects. Love reading these!
Re: Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display
#124Very 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
Re: Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display
#125Incredibly cool, but how is there not a single video on the page!?
Re: Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display
#126I wish everything in the world was like this.
Re: Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display
#127It’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.
Re: Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display
#128That's absolutely useless and that's great!
Re: Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display
#129Ben, the arm seems to be misaligned, it is punching into the shelfes!
Re: Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display
#130Speaking 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 printin…
Look into ticker tape, and dot matrix printing, this is how early computer displays worked.