The dots are so delicate, with tiny magnet wires and soft plastic that can melt, that it has to be done very carefully. Even with the very best desoldering equipment it would take forever.
Put a hot air gun on the back of the board, and they'll either just drop out or do so with a small poke of the pins.
The plastic is likely the problem there. It's quite easy to melt the plastic on parts like this and if it's thin, has a low melting point, and needs to function mechanically it's likely to do more damage than with your average chip package.
Might not be so bad considering that all the plastic is on opposite side of fiberglass board. When desoldering connectors or smd chips, it's often hard to avoid directly blowing hot air at the plastic bits. That's not the case here. Having dots grouped in rows of 7 makes things a bit more challenging. As it means heating up larger area and increase chance of them getting stuck even when all the solder is molten.
But the theory would have to be tested and there aren't many people with so much flipdot panels that desoldering is a major concern. And ones who have few some don't want to risk it. So bulk processing techniques are likely underexplored.
Instead of using capacitors ... why not use a negative supply rail? Then you can switch the direction of the current in a coil using only two transistors.
Summary: Mitxela designed and built circuit board to drive old flip dot displays - boards donated to Sam from Look Mum No Computer and iterating on an approach from Mike at Mike's Electric Stuff. He ended up with 1m^2 of flip dots with an interactive high frame rate fluid simulation.
I can only express my deep respect and recognition for an amazing execution, craftsmanship and video while creating some thing fun and entertaining.
He mentions in the video and in the article Breakfast Studio and I happened to watch a video of one of their panels on an unrelated YouTube channel. I've skipped ahead to when the video has the panel. (there is also a cool egg just before that point in the video) it's only about 5 seconds.
It's really cool to see some innovation in flip-dots and their colours, seems really quiet too. Shame these things cost an arm and leg and are massive, something like this in your house would look great at like 1/5th scale.
Did you try actually watching the video and timestamp? It's pointed to a specific place in the video where they walk past a frame containing something similar (the same?) as what is mentioned in the submission, with mirroring of the person filming etc.
The performer in the Eurovision video is "Look Mum No Computer", aka Sam James Bartle, who runs the museum that was the source for the flip-dot panels. There was a brief call-out near the start of mitxela's video.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 31.5 ms ] threadPut a hot air gun on the back of the board, and they'll either just drop out or do so with a small poke of the pins.
But the theory would have to be tested and there aren't many people with so much flipdot panels that desoldering is a major concern. And ones who have few some don't want to risk it. So bulk processing techniques are likely underexplored.
I can only express my deep respect and recognition for an amazing execution, craftsmanship and video while creating some thing fun and entertaining.
https://youtu.be/2fRx64OTAeI?si=FJDW3OGYLRK0rYox&t=681
It's really cool to see some innovation in flip-dots and their colours, seems really quiet too. Shame these things cost an arm and leg and are massive, something like this in your house would look great at like 1/5th scale.
That would be a bug to me!
https://youtu.be/I0tqgGVQkew
> but for the overview and demo of it working, watch the following youtube video.
If you don't care about the overview and just want to see demos, they start around 9 minutes in.