A Flip Disc Display That Does It Slow And Steady

Flip disc displays can be quite a task to drive, what with having some sort of actuator mechanism for each and every dot in the display. [Zimm] has built an …. A Flip Disc Display That Does It Slow And Steady.

[Zimm] has built an altogether different kind of flip disc display, though, which gets around this with a complexity all its own. There is still an array of discs, in this case, 37 x 18 square discs that are black on one side and blue on the other. They’re not actuated by magnets or any kind of per-disc flipper.

Instead, a CNC machine is charged with flipping them one at a time. There’s a tool head that scans through the array, and uses a color sensor and LIDAR to identify which pixels to flip and how far to push them. It’s not fast, by any means, but it’s a perfectly cromulent way to build a flip disc display, as it turns out.

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