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Comment by aarondf | Hacker News Reader

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

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And absolutely no energy consumption when you don't change the image.

Move over, e-ink displays. A new king is in town.

This will be my new Kindle!

Only drawback is having to hire a C130 if I want to take it on a trip with me :')

It was directly inspired by e-ink, after all.

I think the Mythbusters might still hold the record - https://youtu.be/ZrJeYFxpUyQ?si=pysqKGFiDO99oyvD&t=476

I don't think I want to think of the actual cost per pixel - especially the cost of my time! I have deliberately avoided accounting the final cost

For what it's worth, dollar stores typically sell wooden cubes for arts & crafts purposes (board game designers also like them for prototyping) in bags that work out to a few cents per piece. I guess they're quite a bit smaller than what you ended up using, though. And of course that doesn't account for the frame or the control mechanism. (And now you have me trying to think of more robust ways to turn the pixels...)

When I was a kid, my school had several "1 litre" tubs of 1cm³ wooden cubes so that we could stack them 10x10x10. This would have been very early 80s UK.

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).

But the experience and feeling of building it... priceless. Money can't account for that.

> I created a reciprocating poking mechanism that uses a flexible glue stick

With the most cost effective and creative "wear item" ever.

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

Some more fabulous expensive pixels, the Danny Rosin mirrors mentioned in the article:

https://youtu.be/0o_9CHYeRvI

I came to post about Rosin's work as well. I personally love that he uses clever lighting and angles to create the shading for his pixels instead of just painting one side. It makes it feel like a mirror, all one material like a magic wallhanging.

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.

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