Just googled and I found some on Shein with 200 cubes for £2.50. They also have 2cm sized ones at £1.31 for 20 cubes and 4cm ones for £1.88 for 4 cubes.
You'd still have to drill holes in them all, but I wonder if a different solution might be possible - for instance holes in the wooden strips between the rows of cubes that are slightly wider than screws that hold the cubes suspended from the strips. If they weren't too tight, the cube could rotate freely. But maybe just drilling holes using a CNC would easier (and potentially you could drill all the holes on a flat plane of wood before cutting up into cubes).
Only drawback is having to hire a C130 if I want to take it on a trip with me :')
With the most cost effective and creative "wear item" ever.
That said the one I experienced was an earlier work had was fully driven by hobby servos (or something that sounded very much like them) and when you get even one of those going it's loud as hell. I didn't get to look at the construction too closely and this was many years ago. I expect that he did some kind of sound dampening because it wasn't as.. deafening as I expected. But it still kinda 'took me out of it' a bit.
In addition to the user-controlled modes I also have ambient modes. My favorite is a clock that struggles to draw the current time because it takes too long
Basically you want to avoid keyframes on this thing, they'll kill you
https://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/19/8088-domination-post...
https://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/20/8088-domination-post...
Could turn this into a 4 color display at the cost of drawing speed?
- naively: Levenshtein
- better: real world edit time based on a model of the display : probably dominated by XY travel distance
Given the current image being shown and the next image, you (presumably) want to plot the pixels of the next image as quickly as possible. I believe the optimal algorithm is:
1. Calculate the set of pixels that are changed between the current and next image.
2. Find the shortest path from the plotter's current position through each of those pixels. I believe breadth-first search (O(n)) is sufficient here.
Running this on all potential upcoming images and choosing the one with the lowest total path cost would do what you propose under "better".
How is it volume wise while it's working? Manageable or painful?
I also thought of using hexagonal prisms, showing two faces at a time in paired colours but using three colours. These would also need much less clearance in order to rotate freely, compared to face-on cubes.
https://excalidraw.com/#json=driyv7dR-eODBzuh_hdrk,93QQvkYae...
https://www.rotapanel.com/trivision-mechanism-and-prism-type...
Unfortunately I can't find the video. Will edit if I do (or anybody else finds it first).
It had cubes in different colors so from further away it would look like an image.
Mine was entirely mechanical (driven by punch cards and a hand-crank), and changed all of the pixels in parallel, but a lot of the mechanism development looked extremely familiar to me.
I was recently in the presence of some linotype machines from the 1800s and it's so good to be humbled by the achievements of people who came before us. That machine was so complex, I could barely begin to figure out how to manufacture one. Your discussion of looms reminds me of that!
Has there ever been designed a "display" that is just a thermal printer hidden in one end of a box, and a take-up spool + tensioning spring hidden on the other end, such that the "display" is then a continuous thermal paper "scroll" stretched across the box behind [UV-protective!] glass, that can be "refreshed" by printing a new full-width image to the thermal printer?
This ink is interesting in that it fades when heated (60 C), but darkens when cooled (-10 C). In between those temperatures it is stable.
Thus you could have one loop that is continuously reused. Not sure how many cycles you can get before the ink degrades.
What about some system to shoot wooden spheres into a tube or channel for each scan line, selectively feeding different color spheres. Some combination of gravity or pneumatics to drive it. So a scan line would flush out one end and refill from the other. Then scale it up to a stadium size unit with bowling ball pixels.
I guess a challenging part would be proper timing to recycling the colors back into their appropriate supply channels. And also introducing some kind of damping to quiet it down and reduce the wear and tear on the pixels.
On the other extreme, you could go active matrix and have blocks that simply rotate in place to show different face colors based on some solenoid/servo action.
He's optimizing for some very different things though.
A few suggestions for improvements:
- After completing a submission, move the "pen" out of the way as much as possible to get a clean photo of the completed art before moving onto the next submission.
- On the website, show attribution for the currently in-progress submission.
- On the website, have a "history" gallery for completed submissions. It looks like pending submissions have permalinks that say "Timelapse will be available after this is drawn", but there's no way to discover permalinks for completed submissions (or the in-progress one).
I tested a 1×10 grid of the wooden pixels to try out some different variations as well.
I need to go find some corgi art to upload next!
"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.
My original concept included two webcams, one for OBS, one for ffmpeg. Guess I should have gone with that!
> I have a mechanism to quickly delete problem submissions.
Did you build a male genitalia swastika classifier like the fish guy? (What a sentence)
I found a blog post about it and someone who made one with a servo for each pixel. Now that would be expensive!
https://differencing.blogspot.com/2010/04/kinotrope-clackers...
https://digitalartarchive.siggraph.org/artwork/daniel-rozin-...
In Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar," the "Interstellar library" refers to the tesseract, a 5-dimensional space within a black hole, visualized as a bookshelf. This structure is not a physical library but rather a construct created by future humans, allowing Cooper to interact with the past and relay gravity data to his daughter, Murph.
Super cool project.
BTW I love that you initially went with a very direct e-ink analog with the balls!
Congrats OP!
Also, I'm surprised "All your base are belong to us!" hasn't been submitted yet!
Mumbot 2.0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUzU8HnjBI4&t=1108s
Grian made an animated waterfall with dispensers, snow particles, and potioned arrows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGPS8hURZks
Legends say this is how MicroLEDs are made, one pixel at a time. That's why they are so expensive.
https://gist.github.com/unrealwill/b8f585758880009113805bd95...
Small spherical magnets are quite cheap.
There is hope of physically moving them if you put each sphere into a 3d-printed countersink hole over some metal sheet (so that the magnet is hold in place against the plastic), moving a electro-magnet head over you can rotate the magnet, like a scaled-up version of a 2d magnetic tape.
You may even create a Ising model if you put magnets too close to each other.
Also worth noting this art project: http://breakfastny.com/dot-screen
Edit: Oops there is, it was an issue on my side.
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?:
The sound those things make is just perfect.
joetannenbaum•6mo ago