The disc moves, but there aren't any moving mechanical parts to cause it to move. It's done with electromagnetic pulses. I'll update it to make this more clear.
You might as well say a motor has no moving parts, because it's done with electromagnetic impulses. But that would be absurd.
Obviously the hinge of each disc will wear and tear and eventually fail. Buildups of dust and oil will affect them too and prevent them from flipping. Flipdiscs are as mechanical as mechanical parts get.
You writing in the intro: "...have no moving parts, near limitless lifespan..." is just not credible.
And if I'm being entirely honest, that's where I stopped reading your post, because you simply didn't seem trustworthy. You might want to focus more an accuracy rather than hyperbole if you want to maintain readers.
Probably because they are just a hobbyist and not an expert in the field (nor do they assert that they are). Maybe be a little kinder on the internet. It sounds like it was just a minor oversight.
I really did think about whether or not to write that last paragraph. But the thing is, it's the truth. And I think it's going to be more helpful in the long run for authors to know these things.
Believe me, I've been on the receiving end many times and it's made me a vastly better writer and communicator. When somebody stops reading your article because of a howler, it's much better for you to hear why so you can learn from it.
(And you don't need to be an expert in the field to realize that discs that flip are mechanical, or that they don't have a "near limitless lifespan". These aren't exactly subtle mistakes, and it's one of the main justifications presented in the introduction itself.)
You're seriously insinuating that a person has to be an expert in the field to be able to identify that a device with moving parts has... moving parts in it?
The entire history of the world stands as proof that focusing on hyperbole maintains readers better :)
Though I do wish for more accuracy. These things are totally moving parts, and there is no way they have even a long lifespan, let alone a "near limitless" one. Though to be precise, "near limitless" is meaningless.
It's amazing the type of pretty tame criticism that gets downvoted here these days. Your criticism is entirely factual and has zero hint of malice. I felt the exact same way when I read these things in the article -- just pure nonsense.
So sorry to have caused the confusion. I've updated the post to be more detailed. Honest mistake. I was referencing the mechanical parts of the board that move the dot. For example, unlike Vestaboards, which have a gear to move the panels, flipdisc boards use magnets. Good thing pixels on a webpage are easier to update than pixels on a flipdisc board!
How exactly did the author get the panels? I've looked into stuff like this before and it's basically impossible to source outside of things like eBay. Unless you're willing to buy industrial quantities at industrial prices.
I got mine off eBay, but you can get the same panels from AlfaZeta. There are some more affordable options like: https://xqd-led.en.alibaba.com/productgrouplist-936470954-2/.... I do mention in my post that I would like to see these panels become more affordable for hobbyists. If anyone wants to collaborate on this, please contact me!
Speaking as someone who also recently purchased these panels (and read the second paragraph where they mention where they got them), they're from the company AlfaZeta.
They build and ship from Poland. They don't have a publicly available price list but they cost approx 220 EUR per 7x28 panel. Expensive, but few places still manufacture them.
If you continue reading the post, they also link out to other manufacturers including ones on AliExpress that seem to be cheaper.
They have a work that shows melting polar ice, but I wonder how energy efficient it is (I expect it does not consume energy when nothing flips, but still ...)
Amazing art from this studio! If you like this stuff, check out their "brixels" pieces like the one titled Ocean for the new Fontainebleu Hotel in Vegas
I was curious roughly how long 150 million operations is...
Assuming (literally just a guess) that the tiles "operate" at a rate of 3 times per second playing back a video or something:
(150 million operation) / (3 operations/ second) = 50 million seconds = 578 days
It's likely much slower than 3 operations per second too - so probably 6-10x that in reality, which would be on the order of a decade of continuous runtime before they reach expected EOL.
> Keeping low numer of controllers on one data line, allows to drive these displays with an increadible speed of 15 frames per second (black – to – white).
From Alfazeta's page (including the typos). 15 frames per second feels pretty wild, but would also, unfortunately, change this math pretty considerably if you ran it full tilt.
I had originally assumed 15 fps but it did feel a bit too fast.. BUT a 15 fps video being displayed in black and white doesn't mean the tiles will "flip" 15 times per second - a 15fps video could still mean that a tile doesn't flip at all for 50 "frames".
It does leave you exposed to the risk of a video where one of these does flip like 12 times in a second for like 20 seconds or something.
You could probably analyze whatever video is being played to calculate some kind of like "risk" value or "expected-lifetime-decrease" value to at least better understand what the impact is of the video being played. All that goes out the window when you do the sort of real-time mirroring shown in the article.
I love to see Javascript used for stuff like this. It blew my mind that the James Webb Telescope uses a custom Javascript runtime for a lot of the onboard functions.
As a JavaScript hater, I admit they surely they do, but I'm still curious as to why it was the best choice. If it's a custom runtime, existing runtimes being reliable\secure\well understood by existing engineers isn't relevant. And it's not like they're adding in lots of external libraries either.
no one's doubting it, but they still want to know the reason because it goes contrary to the expectations of most developers here, even the JavaScript fans
Not the parent, but I like seeing particular languages used for something like this because it may be a langauge that I am familiar with along with all of its libraries and tooling. This makes a project like this that interacts with hardware easier to acheive.
It's also intresting to see a language used in a way it's not intended to necessarily our for a creative/unique use. Why do people like to port doom to random devices, because it was never indended to run on those (and it's a challenge/meme at this point)
to speak to your example: my girlfriend's dad was a welder on aluminum boats. he is always excited to see aluminum boats, find out who built them, etc.
Sorry, late reply, but I think it's still worth answering.
I think Javascript is a really fun language. I've done a lot of embedded C and it can be... exhausting? I would love to try Javascript on an embedded system, IoT device, etc. I'll bet a lot of the most annoying stuff can be abstracted away pretty easily on modern hardware.
Man I love those things. I have warm memories of standing in Italian train stations as a kid and letting the clacking wash over me when they did a full board refresh. It’d fade out like a rain stick as the stragglers that started furthest from their target letter trickled in.
Now it’s all LED, which is way more practical and so much less magical.
The lifespan is probably not as limitless as you might have imagined, the discs tend to fall off or get stuck. But they are really neat while they are working, especially how they sounds.
I was at an office with these flip dot displays, and eventually we dismantled the display. I took some picture of the pieces and you can see how stuck discs look like:
For sure. They're similar to butterfly wings. It's easy to lose or break discs. Our kids loved touching them while we were building, and we'd constantly have to replace discs that fell off.
I built a lo-fi device like this (with a LED matrix instead of a flipboard) and I didn't really find great software for building animations at a low pixel count. I ended up doing something super low level where I draw to a buffer directly using ImageMagick. If there's a better library I'd love to know.
The stack here is lo-res but not lo-power. “…we’re leveraging existing web tech that we’ve found to work well - PIXI for general 2D rendering, Three.js for 3D rendering, Matter.js for physics engine, and GSAP for animations. We also utilize node-canvas, and node-gl for server-side rendering.”
I'd be fine with power, I'm running off a raspberry pi that can do all this easily. Still I'm not sure how I'd go about plugging something like PIXI onto a custom display? It draws to a screen from a browser, and I need it to draw to a memory buffer...
In a world of flat featureless screens, I really love the physicality of this. Even the noise it makes. It feels like it communicates a lot more than its raw “pixel” count would suggest.
I think this could be useful as a NOC monitor. Mostly the display is static but if something goes wrong the display updates and the noise naturally draws your attention. No “alarm” necessary.
130 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadYou might as well say a motor has no moving parts, because it's done with electromagnetic impulses. But that would be absurd.
Obviously the hinge of each disc will wear and tear and eventually fail. Buildups of dust and oil will affect them too and prevent them from flipping. Flipdiscs are as mechanical as mechanical parts get.
You writing in the intro: "...have no moving parts, near limitless lifespan..." is just not credible.
And if I'm being entirely honest, that's where I stopped reading your post, because you simply didn't seem trustworthy. You might want to focus more an accuracy rather than hyperbole if you want to maintain readers.
I really did think about whether or not to write that last paragraph. But the thing is, it's the truth. And I think it's going to be more helpful in the long run for authors to know these things.
Believe me, I've been on the receiving end many times and it's made me a vastly better writer and communicator. When somebody stops reading your article because of a howler, it's much better for you to hear why so you can learn from it.
(And you don't need to be an expert in the field to realize that discs that flip are mechanical, or that they don't have a "near limitless lifespan". These aren't exactly subtle mistakes, and it's one of the main justifications presented in the introduction itself.)
Though I do wish for more accuracy. These things are totally moving parts, and there is no way they have even a long lifespan, let alone a "near limitless" one. Though to be precise, "near limitless" is meaningless.
https://www.smoothware.com/danny/woodenmirror.html
or more recently
https://tisch.nyu.edu/itp/news/spring-2024/daniel-rozin--itp...
Ingenious!
Thank you for sharing
Or traveling. I imagine if you wanted to you could position the disc at any point between “on” and “off” by constantly flipping it back and forth.
>AlfaZeta makes brand new displays, with a controller board. Their XY5 displays (14x28) sells around 500€ (VAT and shipping included).
https://hackaday.io/project/159415-flip-dot-display-diy-cont...
The result is really nice, and makes the conclusion make a lot of sense.
> I do hope that flipdiscs become more accessible for hobbyists. If anyone wants to collaborate on new affordable flipdisc hardware, let me know!
€4500 is quite the pill to swallow (unless prices have gotten cheaper since that 2018 Hackaday project)
How did they buy them, and for how much?
I feel like that's a key data point that would help people decide if they want to explore this further.
edit: someone further down the thread discusses pricing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40791049
They build and ship from Poland. They don't have a publicly available price list but they cost approx 220 EUR per 7x28 panel. Expensive, but few places still manufacture them.
If you continue reading the post, they also link out to other manufacturers including ones on AliExpress that seem to be cheaper.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://localhost:4321/">
HN extracts these.
I've fixed it now.
https://breakfaststudio.com/flip-discs
Assuming (literally just a guess) that the tiles "operate" at a rate of 3 times per second playing back a video or something:
(150 million operation) / (3 operations/ second) = 50 million seconds = 578 days
It's likely much slower than 3 operations per second too - so probably 6-10x that in reality, which would be on the order of a decade of continuous runtime before they reach expected EOL.
From Alfazeta's page (including the typos). 15 frames per second feels pretty wild, but would also, unfortunately, change this math pretty considerably if you ran it full tilt.
It does leave you exposed to the risk of a video where one of these does flip like 12 times in a second for like 20 seconds or something.
You could probably analyze whatever video is being played to calculate some kind of like "risk" value or "expected-lifetime-decrease" value to at least better understand what the impact is of the video being played. All that goes out the window when you do the sort of real-time mirroring shown in the article.
What? The display is made almost entirely of moving discs.
For the unawares, the original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtutLA63Cp8
My favorite version, also using real-life objects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT-fdnIK0k0 (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39527559)
I love to see Javascript used for stuff like this. It blew my mind that the James Webb Telescope uses a custom Javascript runtime for a lot of the onboard functions.
I found this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19739454
" The language itself wasn’t so important as having adequate performance, robustness, memory use, reproducibility and extreme QC"
but I still don't understand. Interesting they went with a language that doesn't even have integers.
At least the comments on this reddit thread have some hilarious jokes:
https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/wrtny3/the_jame...
Looks like they released a paper, the abstract of which, indicates it's not a fully custom runtime, which would make more sense:
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006SPIE.6274E..0AB/abstra...
Unfortunately they want money to read the rest of it and I'm curious but not that curious, and I probably wouldn't understand it anyway.
It would be like being excited at seeing someone using aluminum to build something over steel/wood/etc.
I think Javascript is a really fun language. I've done a lot of embedded C and it can be... exhausting? I would love to try Javascript on an embedded system, IoT device, etc. I'll bet a lot of the most annoying stuff can be abstracted away pretty easily on modern hardware.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19739454
Still not sure why they chose JavaScript.
According to their paper it's a commercial JavaScript engine however:
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006SPIE.6274E..0AB/abstra...
Reminds me of the “flip flap” boards in old train stations. Like https://www.vestaboard.com/
Now it’s all LED, which is way more practical and so much less magical.
The lifespan is probably not as limitless as you might have imagined, the discs tend to fall off or get stuck. But they are really neat while they are working, especially how they sounds.
I was at an office with these flip dot displays, and eventually we dismantled the display. I took some picture of the pieces and you can see how stuck discs look like:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/onpHefUVL8oeP4si7
How do you remove dust from them? I imagine that's when they break.
So how much do one of those cost? The website (https://flipdots.com/en/products-services/flip-dot-boards-xy...) notably has no prices listed.
I love the idea but that's WAY to expensive for me.
[1] https://hackaday.io/project/159415-flip-dot-display-diy-cont...