Let’s state the obvious – Split Flap displays are incredibly easy to build. Rotating drum, some flaps (go paint them yourself), a motor and a case: voila!
There’s two complicating factors though: A single display element is really boring, it’s like eating a single french fry. Enough to get the idea, not enough to get the job done. And also, whatever you’re building doesn’t need to rotate once or twice correctly – and land on the same character – it needs to do so forever. Or at least often.
Meet: Endurance. The general idea is that I’m doing a simple acceptance test of the whole module, from electronics to the mechanics, and also the wear of primarily the flaps.
And the setup is remarkably simple. Every flip forward module is driven by an ESP8266 at its core, and thus can connect to WiFi.
On the other end is a Raspberry Pi that’s just going through the alphabet backwards, making sure that the longest path for each character change is used: Instead of going from A to B, which would just be a small number of steps, we’re going from B to A, which leads to an almost full rotation.
This display you’re seeing in the clip is somewhere at around 15k character displays, and I’ve had to do a few tweaks to reduce wear on the flaps – exactly why those tests are so important.
What I like is that it’s a rather easy way to get a lot of things validated and tested at the same time: From power delivery and energy distribution on the controller board over to the thermal characteristics of the stepper driver after running for a few hours to more subjective things like: How does this thing change its sound after a few hours (hint: it doesn’t).
And while it’s fun to see all of this rotating at full speed, there’s something even more satisfying about the slo-mo. Enjoy!
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