Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display

Summary

TL,DR: I built the world's most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it VIDEO If you just want to play with it, goto kilopx.com. The backstory Six years ago I had an idea to build a large, inefficient display with a web interface that anyone could interact with. I've enjoyed Danny Rozin's unconvenional mirrors over the years and was inspired by an eInk movie player that played at 24 frames per hour that got me thinking about a laborious display that could slowly assemble an image. I landed on the idea of a 40×25 pixel grid of pixels, turned one by one by a single mechanism. Compared to our modern displays with millions of pixels changing 60 times a second, a wooden display that changes a single pixel 10 times a minute is an incredibly inefficient way to create an image. Conveniently, 40×25 = 1,000 pixels, leading to the name Kilopixel and the six-letter domain name kilopx.com. How do you back down from that? That's the best domain name I've ever owned. So I got to work. This project has everything: a web app, a physical controller, a custom CNC build, generated gcode, tons of fabrication, 3d modeling, 3d printing, material sourcing - so much to get lost in. It's the most ambitious project I've ever built. The first prototype: 21×3 pixels My first thought was to use a wooden gantry that would ride on some sort of track. Since I'm most comfortable working with wood, it's my default prototyping medium. However, I quickly pivoted to extruded aluminum and the excellent hardware kits from Openbuilds that include pulleys, gantry parts, extruded aluminum, and timing belts. It's very similar to the materials used in 3D printer frames, and connects very easily with off the shelf stepper motors. This allowed me to build a gantry with X and Y, essentially a wall-mounted XY plotter. I built the first prototype with two stepper motors, a Raspberry Pi, a CNC controller, and a beefy power supply. It allowed me to generating and sending instructions to ...