This is not an LED display, it’s a thread display. The hardware artists over at Breakfast, a Brooklyn based rapid product and prototype company, built this color display that uses spools of thread for each pixel. 6,400 spools to be exact.
Serious work went into this thing, and the results couldn’t be better. Check out the video after the break to see for yourself. The trick is to increase the surface area of the spools of thread. This is done by using the spool as a pulley which guides a 5.5 foot length of “threaded fabric”. Up close, the fabric looks as if it’s just wrapped around the wooden spool, but the extra length provides enough room for 36 different colors, each blending into the next in a gradient effect. Index the location of the fabric in each pixel system and you have a wide range of color options.
The piece was commissioned by clothing retailer Forever 21 and has even been given its own website. The display pulls Instagram photos with the #F21threadscreen hashtag and displays them. You can watch a live stream for the next week, and the dedicated site has a search feature to find a recording of your own photo by username.
We must once again give credit for producing the kind of advertising we want to see. This is both interesting and awesome. It gave some talented people work producing it, and sharing the details of the build is both interesting and inspiring for us. Want to see some more interesting advertising like this? Check out that Beck’s bottle used as a phonograph cylinder, and the extreme engineering used to separate Oreos.
That is awesome! Devorah Sperber is an artists who creates works with spools of thread. http://www.devorahsperber.com/thread_works_index_html_and_2x2s/index.html
Very neat build and it looks like a serious amount of effort went into it. How do they account for drift of the color over time? Do they spool and unspool at slightly different rates, leading to eventual color mismatch (a sort of spool backlash) or is there some kind of color detector in place or homing routine that can adjust for this over time?
@Waterjet : each motor has a homing IR sensor and the pixels are fitted with a retroreflective strip. From this we have a fixed known position on the fabric, every once in a while we make the pixel pass over the sensor with the reflective strip and we zero out our position counters. And yes I can confirm a serious amount of effort went into it. =)
From the looks of things, just setting up the initial module block took a long time. Then replicating it over and over and over again took a good while too, no doubt. Looks very well engineered and very well built. Nice work.
What caused the control board being tested in the video to catch fire? Over current / short?
The machine is basically a van der graaf generator. We had over 20kV of static on the ribbons. We did anticipate this, but not to the extent we witnessed once we got a meter out to measure it. More grounded copper wire and grounded plates in the pixel modules fixed this problem.
Can you or do you share some technical specs on things like power usage, current draw, etc?
Almost looks like they knew they had a dead board, so they set it up in front of the camera and then intentionally dumped a lot of amps through it :)
I don’t see any marks for setting possition zero on the belts. They could just have a human push the belt around to the correct colour, or use a camera.
I’d imagine position sensor could be inside the loop, so not visible from the outside.
Very nice build! +100 for creativity. Love it!
And making it even it cooler, its 200 motor controllers are powered by 8-bit AVRs!
200 motor controllers? How do you do animation unless you have 1 motor per pixel?
Modules are 8×4, so each module have 32 pixels.. then 6400/32 = 200.
Each motor controller drives 32 motors. Each avr controls 16 driver chips, which drives 2 motors each.
Shameless plug.
so… how long until someone gets doom to run on this?
refresh rate seems a bit low for that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EBnrh-WSto
Not as slow as Doom when I tried Doom on my 386SX 16Mhz.
“It’s not a problem with the hardware. It’s your perception of time that’s at fault.”
So, make it really big then fly away from it at near C? Time dilation should make everything else seem to speed up.
So Bad Apple is pretty much out on this display.
blue smoke alert 1:45!!
Great build
#Triggerwarning
Great build. I’m an Altium zealot and appreciated seeing the 2d/3d layout shots.
Hey, multithreading can be hard! ;-)
I noticed an interesting optical illusion when scrolling through this article. The rows of spools appear to move in the picture of the machine with the link to play the video. It appears that my scroll amount almost exactly matches the vertical spacing between the rows so that when scrolling up, all of the rows appear to be bending down on the right edge. When scrolling down, all of the rows appear to be bending up. It reminded me of a never ending scale recording where a scale one octave lower is progressively blended in with the original scale. It fools your ear into thinking that the scale is going up forever.
It has a stuck pixel in the upper right quadrant in the streaming video.
I wonder if they considered using a drive shaft (ie. one motor per full row) and clutch system instead of so many individual motors and controllers.
I don’t know if the motors are two driven (H-bridge) or single direction. In two way mode the shaft/clutch approach would not be possible. In one way mode you need just one switching transistor per motor as you would need per clutch.
I just saw in the video, they used stepper motors. In this case the drive is 2 H-bridges! But they need no position encoders, just one reference sensor. With DC-motors or clutches, they would need much more precise position sensing.
When I see these people I think with half of them that they are so clueless that they can’t possibly have actually made or coded any part of this and they just had some not-shown engineer or the chinese do it and they are merely the facade.
I love this comment. There should be a HAD prize given to the most obnoxious commenter.
Jolly Wrencher on the Thread Screen – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgUDwdP9BlE
Yay!
What I’m dying to know is how did they dye the thread (so consistently) and how did they mount the thread to the fabric backing so straight and consistently?