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Had a quick look and the cheapest laser cutter appears to be around $400. The next one is $1500 and then the price just keeps on climbing.
Any first-hand experiences with laser cutters? An option suitable for an (occasional) hobbyist use, but not a total junk either.
Scott Bezek has a great video on "How a Split Flap Display Works" [0]. He also sells blank "flaps" on Tindie [1]. The documentation on how to build the Split Flap is also really awesome [2], including how to cut your own flaps [3]. I've been following this project for a while. It's pretty awesome. I estimate about $10 per character (as opposed to the $180/character (!!) another poster mentioned through Alibaba), with…
Laser cutting a bunch of sheets at once could be one option, but material selection might be a problem: PVC releases chlorine when laser cut, which will do all sorts of horrible things to optics/the meatbag operating the machine. Maybe a cutting plotter will work, since you're using really thin sheets?
The only two I could think of are:
- they don't emit light, so maybe there could be some kind of light-sensitive situation where this would be required (though in that case e-ink would surely surpass it).
- the sound passively-alerting those present to updates. It's not obtrusive or attention-getting like a bell or spoken announcement, so only those wishing to notice the updates can listen for the sound, while others can go about their business unperturbed.
Anyone know of, or could imagine any others?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can only flip in one direction, so the time taken to update is entirely dependent on the previous state. Worst case you'd need to display the previous character (B -> A for alphabetical order) and would have to flip through the entire alphabet to get to it. This only applies if you have only one copy of each letter. You can consider having more copies of frequent letters mixed into the stack, if the stack's thi…
Wouldn't that only help with the average case, not the worst case? Either you have multiple copies of every character (in which case you're still flipping through the same number of characters as the original stack), or some characters don't have duplicates.
So have the alphabet ordered in descending frequency. But put a second block of the most common characters half-way through. For each word you first calculate the slowest letter, which gives you a 'budget' of how many flips you will take. Then each letter uses that budget to get to the optimal location of the character it needs to display, probably as early in the alphabet as possible.
If you know which word is being displayed _next_, you can also try to get into the best position to move to in preparation.
The ideal alphabet ordering might be different depending on position in the word -- for instance, some letters are more common at the start of a word. And you could think about digraphs, taking advantage of Q usually being followed by U.
> laser cut enclosure Had a quick look and the cheapest laser cutter appears to be around $400. The next one is $1500 and then the price just keeps on climbing. Any first-hand experiences with laser cutters? An option suitable for an (occasional) hobbyist use, but not a total junk either.
Generally speaking, for cutting anything above paper or balsa wood, you will need module that costs around $500, higher power modules need decent power supply.
There are some laser cutters from china that claim to have such power for less, but there is not jet "consensus" on any of DYI forums/reddit's that any of them are good jet.
> laser cut enclosure Had a quick look and the cheapest laser cutter appears to be around $400. The next one is $1500 and then the price just keeps on climbing. Any first-hand experiences with laser cutters? An option suitable for an (occasional) hobbyist use, but not a total junk either.
> laser cut enclosure Had a quick look and the cheapest laser cutter appears to be around $400. The next one is $1500 and then the price just keeps on climbing. Any first-hand experiences with laser cutters? An option suitable for an (occasional) hobbyist use, but not a total junk either.
Generally cheap machines have compromises which mean more work for you - less reliable, less accurate, weaker laser, worse software - all of that means a lot more trial and error, a lot more burnt material and a lot more stuff you just can't do.
If you want to laser cut thicker materials, but only occasionally, you'd probably find it much more cost effective (and low effort) to either outsource or find a makerspace which has a decent machine. Laser cutting is quite easy to outsource as it is very easy to fully specify what you want (2D drawing + material specification is all you need).
Genuine question: what are some practical advantages of a split-flap display over, well... any other kind of dynamic character display? The only two I could think of are: - they don't emit light, so maybe there could be some kind of light-sensitive situation where this would be required (though in that case e-ink would surely surpass it). - the sound passively-alerting those present to updates. It's not obtrusive or…
I could just about imagine a genuine use case in some kind of hostile environment. You could probably make one of these very resistant to water/temperature/radiation, with the controller kept safely out of the way.
> laser cut enclosure Had a quick look and the cheapest laser cutter appears to be around $400. The next one is $1500 and then the price just keeps on climbing. Any first-hand experiences with laser cutters? An option suitable for an (occasional) hobbyist use, but not a total junk either.
As others have suggested, jobbing it out or joining a makerspace is often the best choice for occasional use.