Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display (benholmen.com)

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

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

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

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.

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.

Amazing.

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

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

This is so great

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

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.)

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).

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.

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

This is awesome, Ben!

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?

Such a cool project, Ben!

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.

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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/

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).

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?

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

Best practical application of glue stick ever!

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

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