[soiboi soft]’s vacuum-driven dot matrix display is part suction gripper, part touchscreen, and altogether impressive. Its display capabilities are entirely shadow-based, with each pixel being made of a cavity behind a flexible silicone sheet; when the display’s microfluidic logic circuitry activates a pixel, a vacuum pump pulls the sheet inwards, creating a visible hollow.

As in previous iterations, the display’s control circuitry is built around a pneumatic “transistor”, which allows an air channel to be opened or closed by applying vacuum to a control channel. As a first test, [soiboi soft] built a 16-pixel dot matrix display. Eight control channels – four row and four column channels – are multiplexed to individually control each pixel. The transistors act like one-way valves, so the pixels hold their state, even when pressed in by hand; simply add some circuitry to read a pixel’s state, and it would be a fully-functioning touchscreen. The supporting pneumatics also got an upgrade; the solenoid valves now cleanly mount to the back of the board, and the vacuum pump connects via a Luer lock adapter.

The 3D printing used to make certain parts and silicone molds caused issues when scaling up to a 64-pixel display, however. The parts were warping, destroying the seal necessary to keep pixels “on”. To straighten them out, [soiboi soft] pressed the printed part against a flat glass build plate in a vacuum bag and annealed it at 60 Celsius for several hours. This worked quite well, particularly when slightly raised rings were printed around the area to be sealed. Once all these bugs were worked out, the display was clear and decently responsive. [soiboi soft] was able to display letters, numerals, and animations, and even able to play Pong and Snake. It won’t be setting any refresh rate records, but it was nevertheless fully usable.

For another approach to playing Snake with microfluidics, check out this project. If printing molds and casting silicone seems too fiddly, there are always other ways to make microfluidic circuits.