Flip flap flip flap display
Split-flap displays are cool. And recently, I learned that you can 3D print them! And together with a friend of me, we decided to make a lot of them, three rows of 15, so 45 in total. There were only a few small problems, I disliked the way his electronics mounted (why mount them on the back when there is a perfectly sized PCB spot on the module?) and we also wanted to make a few other small modifications that I no longer remember. Luckily for me, I owned had all parts needed to start experimenting. This video shows the first time that the module was assembled, with a motor inside. I powered this module using a spare PCB from a different project
And it all seemed to work perfectly fine. So, some playing later, it all worked using a breadboard:
This setup uses an ATtiny404, an A3144 HAL sensor and a common 28BYJ motor. This is fairly similar to the original electronic setup, however the main difference is in the shape of the PCB; which can be seen in KiCad here, along with some other images:
Currently we are still working on making many more modules, and also on making them consistent. Some 3D prints aren’t perfectly straight and not all magnets/motors are as strong as the others. This still requires some tweaking in the firmware to make the calibration perfect
When all 45 modules are ready, they will be exposed via MQTT, where they can display messages send on a topic. Just a handful of them already look/sound great; I cannot wait to see/hear all of them running at the same time.
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