A few weeks ago my ridiculous kilopixel wooden pixel display went a little crazy on the internet. I wrote about the response and the experience as a whole, and feature some of the art that was drawn on my display.
Readit Newsbenholmen commented on Recap: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display benholmen.com/blog/kilopi... · Posted by u/benholmen
There is a live view, but it looks like the machine has broken down
I had some down time when the Y axis stepper motor managed to unplug itself overnight!
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?:
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
Your idea is not too far from marble pixel art machines... https://youtu.be/w1ks0Vy98KI
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.