Despite the availability of ready-made displays never being better, there are still some hardy experimenters who take on the challenge of making their own. In [Ben Holmen]’s case the display he built is somewhat unusual and not the most practical, but for us a giant-sized wooden kilopixel display is exactly what the world needs.
It’s a kilopixel display because it has a resolution of 40 by 25 pixels, and it takes the form of a rack of wooden cubes, each of which can be turned by a tool on a gantry to expose either a black or a white side. It’s very slow indeed — he has an over nine hour long video of it in operation — but it is an effective device.
His write-up goes into great detail about the steps taken in its design, starting with spherical pixels rotated by a LEGO wheel and progressing to cubes poked at their corner to rotate. The pusher in this case is a hot glue stick, for the required flexibility. For practicality we’re reminded of this serial oil-and-water display.
The whole thing is online, and if you want you can submit your own images for it to draw. Whether a Wrencher in 25 pixel resolution has enough detail, we’ll leave to you.
With rotating cubes (presuming two faces are along the axis of rotation) there are four faces that can face the viewer. He could have made it a 2-bits per pixel gray scale display for (almost) the same cost and effort.
Emulate original Gameboy screen?
To be EXTRA NERDY — how about each pixel being a D&D 20 sided die (or wtf they are, i’ve never played D&D) and then somehow get the right side to face out robotically. it could be a color display!
Imagine the sound of a thousand Selectric heads moving at once
i decided to submit Wrencher to represent HAD on the Kilopixel, be sure to vote for it if you want go see the logo get drawn:
https://kilopx.com/naf.nyc/BDiFrq
According to Google he longest movie ever made is Logistics, an experimental film clocking in at 857 hours (35 days and 17 hours). Imagine playing this movie, frame by frame, on the kilopixel display? Your grandchildren might see the end.
This reminds me of the mechanical visual display the “kinotrope” from The Difference Engine. I was always intrigued by the idea, but I’m glad someone else made it coz I’m sure I lack even 1% of the required patience…