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benholmenon Recap: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

$250!

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

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.

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

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?

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

It was indeed < 1 day

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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!

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

Western Wisconsin, Eau Claire. It's beautiful here

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

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.

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

Rozin was a direct influence on me! Seeing his stuff ~10 years ago got me thinking about unorthodox displays.

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

This is incredible! I can appreciate how much work it took to make this happen. Well done!

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!

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

Genius. I'll do this when I install it in my Zoom background and take it off the internet

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

Oh I kinda love the idea of drawing the next one based on the pixel diff! Would be fun to game that queue.

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

TTFP will surely be < 1 day

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

That it, the method will forever be called the Vanna White Method

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

Yes! I have an RGB sensor that could handle that, but it's more bulky than the simple IR on/off sensor I went with. Could be four colors, or four shades of a color.

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

y'know, I've been excited / feared that Bad Apple would show up. The good news is a lot of frames would probably just be a few pixels to change from the previous frame, so some might draw really quickly.

Basically you want to avoid keyframes on this thing, they'll kill you

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

I think I might put this in my friend's coffee shop but I'll restrict access to people in the coffee shop. Not going to let the internet get a hold of that.

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

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

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

benholmenon Starting an Airline

Which biography is that? I see a few on Amazon.

benholmenon Make the Metric system the standard in the United States

Do you have a source for that?

benholmenon IE10 on Windows 7 available in November

Similarly, IE9 allows you to select IE7, IE8, IE9, and IE9 Compatibility Mode. In my experience these browser modes are not identical to their stand-alone counterparts. If you are serious about finding and fixing layout bugs for IE7/IE8 users, you really should roll an XP VM for each of those browsers. Notably, IE8 users commonly browse in IE8 Compatibility Mode which has its own quirks as well, and it's completely unavailable in IE9.

I wish I didn't have to know this stuff.

benholmenon Valve Software recruits hardware experts

Ben Krasnow is a peripheral hardware designer (and all-around hacker) that recently went to Valve to work on "Top Secret" projects. Previously he developed specialized input devices for use around MRI machines so I assume his "Top Secret" projects at Valve involve peripherals.

His blog is really interesting and definitely worth following.

G+ profile: https://plus.google.com/115054970849159689228/about

A post on his blog where he discusses his previous business and mentions working at Valve: http://benkrasnow.blogspot.com/2012/08/tour-of-bens-shop-201...

benholmenon Larry Ellison Buys Most of Lanai

That's an interesting statement. Do you have a citation for that so I can read more about it?

benholmenon My first month freelancing

I tried to subscribe to your site in Google Reader but it could not detect your feed. Since you're running Wordpress I was able to locate http://alanhollis.com/feed/ but you should probably add some link tags in your header that indicate the location of your RSS feed.

I'm eager to hear more about your progress. Good luck!