benholmen

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.

I had some down time when the Y axis stepper motor managed to unplug itself overnight!

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.

Hey, I know you! Thanks for checking it out, looking forward to seeing you at the next PHP×MSP!

$250!

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 love this so much! Will it be mounted so that gravity makes the pins fall back down or do you need a retraction mechanism?

It was indeed < 1 day

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.

Thanks for thinking through it! I've found that moving left-right is a little noisier and has a little vibration - up-down is smoother. However, it's not that noisy and it'd be fun to experiment with different algorithms for finding the next pixel.

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

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!

Western Wisconsin, Eau Claire. It's beautiful here

Pretty quiet! I spent some time figuring out how to make sure the stepper motors don't whine (the answer is microstepping and decent motor controllers). The pixel turning is very quiet unless it misses slightly, then it makes a clunk.