Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display

Awesome project! I built a somewhat similar 30-pixel display: https://www.chrisfenton.com/the-pixelweaver/

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.

Really cool! I just watched it finish "cat saying 'hi'". It doesn't look like any new posts have shown up on @kilopx.com on Bluesky for the last 9 days 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).

A refresh rate of 370 microhertz gives "Calm Technology" a whole new meaning. I love it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology

This has to be the the most expensive cost per pixel display I've ever seen. And I've never loved a display more. This is absurd in the best possible way

Another idea: have the cubes point an edge straight forward (instead of a face). Then if each cube has two adjacent dark sides and two adjacent light sides, one could setup two ‘simultaneous’ images: one viewed from the left at 45° and another viewed from the right. (Each pixel would have four possibilities.)

Super cool and congrats for getting it done. You should be proud, even just for persisting all these years.

Also, I'm surprised "All your base are belong to us!" hasn't been submitted yet!

This is pretty cool as-is, but I can't help but try to think up ways to increase the speed. (Not the point, I know.) I feel like it should be able to do a whole column pretty quickly with some optimizations. If the device that turns a block could do so without needing x-axis alignment to change, then you could do a whole column pretty quickly. Or perhaps it'd be better to do rows instead of columns, since the y-axis alignment shouldn't need to change with the current device. As for the block-turning device itself, I think some sort of thing that rotates would speed things up since you wouldn't need to reset, I think. I bet a manufacturing automation specialist could get this thing cruising...

BTW I love that you initially went with a very direct e-ink analog with the balls!

You have four sides to each pixel cube, have you considered black, white and two grey levels?

Very cool. I loved reading your write-up. It reminded me of something I'd read in a steampunk novel once. I had to Google it to get the details. It's the kinotrope from Gibson & Sterling's Difference Engine.

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...

Speaking of "alternatives to e-ink for a zero-power-use-when-not-updating dot-matrix display"...

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?

I keep trying to imagine "faster" variations.

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.

There's a full colour one of these in the entrance hallway inside the Berlin Technikmuseum, near the Zuse exhibit - there are 12800 cubes, each with 4 colours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfWFLnsy6QA

I'm working on something similar, but 3D and faster motion: PinThing / TAP (Tangible Actuated Pins) [1]

"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.

[1]: https://youtu.be/tx4W3ZDA_Vg

There was a fish project on here a few days ago that also had to deal with uh... adverserial images and it was (mostly?) solved by training a neural net to detect those.

You could order the presentation of a set of images by some distance metric :)

- naively: Levenshtein

- better: real world edit time based on a model of the display : probably dominated by XY travel distance

Reminded me of NYU's Wooden Mirror Project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb6eFGbwPeA

But can it run doom?

This is really exciting. The world of non-electronic computer interfaces has a ton of potential, so I love seeing people build them and write up their experiences.

Congrats OP!

this similar(?) one paints one pixel at a time, but with ping pong balls

https://everyware.kr/home/portfolio/r/

This is fantastic, great job! I loved reading about the process, and it's the sort of pointless thing I really enjoy seeing done to perfection.

Rad. The occasional crazy project like this is what keeps me on HN.

This is cool. I wonder, as you were iterating on the design and development, why didn't you start with a very small grid (10x10) to validate or test different options for their practicality and operation before scaling up to the 1000 pixel versions? It might have saved a lot of time and money, but maybe small scale tests aren't sufficient to work out the kinks?

Hah, cool, I had an idea for a similar project (although I'm not crazy enough to make 1000 pixels, or a robot to turn them for me). But I got as far as making a JavaScript simulation and realised I couldn't be bothered manually turning the beads https://incoherency.co.uk/beadboard/

Very nice!

> I have a mechanism to quickly delete problem submissions.

Did you build a male genitalia swastika classifier like the fish guy? (What a sentence)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44719222

Really cool and it would totally work for a restaurant/coffee shop.

Amazing.

Could turn this into a 4 color display at the cost of drawing speed?

Incredible write-up and a hugely ambitious project. Thanks for sharing!

Oh hey, I know you IRL from the PHP meetups! I've been watching this develop on Bluesky!

Super cool project.

Wow. Impressive. I would never have guessed you'd use a Vanna White / Wheel of Fortune turning method.

This is awesome! Just so you know, you are legally obligated to do Bad Apple when interest dies down.

This has been a fun project to follow. Great job, Ben! Hope I'll see one of these in a coffee shop, mall, or airport one day.

this is what I come to hacker news for. this. so awesome

This used to exist! I remember a video about this large analog billboard in Amsterdam (?).

Unfortunately I can't find the video. Will edit if I do (or anybody else finds it first).

Super cool project! I see the map on the wall.. where in Wisconsin are ya?

When you commit, you really commit. What an incredibly cool project.

I need to go find some corgi art to upload next!

It may be "ridiculous" but the fact remains that you are (clearly) awesome.

this is so cool! add some Mark Rober build type music montage and this is a viral video on YT

This is great, but you can get even more impractical: build a framebuffer!

This is so great

How is it volume wise while it's working? Manageable or painful?

Best practical application of glue stick ever!

This is awesome, Ben!

See also Daniel Rozin’s Wooden Mirror [1999]

https://digitalartarchive.siggraph.org/artwork/daniel-rozin-...

It reminds me of this

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.

Such a cool project, Ben!

Evil triumphs when good people lean into their hobbies.