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

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

Rexxar · 20 days ago

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

kulahan · 20 days ago

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

joemi · 19 days ago

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

ortusdux · 19 days ago

I think the Mythbusters might still hold the record - https://youtu.be/ZrJeYFxpUyQ?si=pysqKGFiDO99oyvD&t=476

benholmen · 20 days 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

lemonberry · 19 days ago

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

zahlman · 20 days 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...)

zer00eyz · 20 days ago

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

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

benholmen · 19 days ago

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

robocat · 19 days ago

Some more fabulous expensive pixels, the Danny Rosin mirrors mentioned in the article:

https://youtu.be/0o_9CHYeRvI

sleepybrett · 19 days 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.

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.)

mxfh · 19 days ago

If you're willing to sacrifice a color just use triangles/prisms the faces could then just be virtually adjacent and still rotate independently

https://excalidraw.com/#json=driyv7dR-eODBzuh_hdrk,93QQvkYae...

mxfh · 19 days ago

I guess the patents are long expired now and don't really apply to pixels, but that concept exists already for non-pixelated images and sadly these are replaced mostly by LEDs now in the wild:

https://www.rotapanel.com/trivision-mechanism-and-prism-type...

boothby · 20 days ago

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

zahlman · 19 days 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.)

robocat · 19 days ago

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

fentonc · 20 days 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.

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 · 19 days 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

re · 20 days 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).

Dead Comment

theletterf · 20 days ago

A refresh rate of 370 microhertz gives "Calm Technology" a whole new meaning. I love it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology

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

theletterf · 19 days ago

I do! https://passo.uno/best-tech-writing-books/

bl0rg · 20 days ago

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

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!

aarondf · 20 days ago

xpe · 20 days ago

GistNoesis · 19 days 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.

bubblebeard · 19 days 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.

TrnsltLife · 20 days 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...

jwagenet · 20 days ago

Breakfast design has made a number of similar panels with different “mediums”, likely inspired by Rozin’s work: https://breakfaststudio.com/works/echo