Vintage Flip Dot Displays Are Incredible!
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- Опубликовано: 14 янв 2024
- In this vid Simon @TheEPROM9, Ash and Connor walk us through the new flip dot display at the museum!
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#museum #electromechanical #restoration 
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Hearing all the folks in the background enjoying the museum made me smile! ... and jealous that they're there and I'm across an ocean 😢
When we first introduced these flip dots for Railway Departure boards in the '80s we had a lot of trouble with dirt making the dots stick. This was solved by having a dot reversing programme run over all dots at around 2am for about 15 mins to repeatedly exercise all dots to keep the pivot points mobile and the air draft from them all moving to blow away loose dust and dirt.
A different construction of one manufacturer used cylinders instead of disks which was far more resilient to dust and dirt - each character was an individual module that could be individually replaced - it was however an expensive solution.
Company in the Czech Republic called BUSE still makes Flip-DOT modules and displays :) They also have a version with integrated LED's and call it DOT-LED (BS210 model).
I have seen those online, would love to get some.
The world needs more nerds! Fantastic :)
Yeah, you’ve got to love the dots
In Stockholm they have a busfront with flipdot display set up in their transport museum. You can choose the text shown on it with a touchscreen, options include "mordor" or the Swedish word for "sofa" besides other more serious or funny "destinations"
A set of pre-set destinations to choose from so people like me can't type in something obscene. :(
What excellent happy chaos! "Where's the stool?", asks Sam, as he walks past a folded step ladder in the corner 😅❤
I'm no expert in Python, but those maps you're hardcoding could probably be read in by the actual bitmap and scrub for black and white to generate your true/false mappings. I don't have an implementation in mind, but I'd start with reading in the file and seeking row by row for black and white bits for true and false. Love this idea so much. Thanks for putting so much effort into this guys.
For sure. Numpy and PIL should get the job done.
I love Python and have been using it daily since the mid 90s... so when the video showed some of the source code, I actually flinched. As a quick no-effort hack to proof-of-concept test the screen in a hurry, I guess it's okay... but it definitely needs a full rewrite.
Even simpler, convert the BMP to Portable BitMap format (PBM) and slurp that in as-is. Could do it via ImageMagic. PBM is an ascii file with a one bit per pixel matrix. File starts with magic number "P1" to identify it as a PBM. Lines starting with "#" are comments/ignored. Next are image width and height integers. Next is a matrix where 0=black and 1=white. Example of raw BPM file from Wikipedia...
P1
# This is an example bitmap of the letter "J"
6 10
0 0 0 0 1 0
0 0 0 0 1 0
0 0 0 0 1 0
0 0 0 0 1 0
0 0 0 0 1 0
0 0 0 0 1 0
1 0 0 0 1 0
0 1 1 1 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0
Had a friend who manages the largest (at the time) flip dot display for Coca Cola in Atlanta. That thing was loud! Cool to see this one going up in the museum
I had the HUGE chance to salvage a complete Hanover Displays kit on a decommissioned bus at one of my ex company. 3 Flip Dot Displays, a Front one that is almost 2.5 Meters wide Made of 4 Modules Like shown in the video, a Side one, a Back one and Others random Displays in case I break one of the 3 above or if I want to mess Something. Also all the cables and a DERIC+ Controller. The Controller Can be reprogrammed with any RS 232 port and the Helen3.3 Software ist easily findable one the Internet. And as a bus driver, I Can tell you that Hanover Displays is the best destination Display system I ever encountered by far ! Ease to use, functionalities, ease of programming and reliability are the 4 Factors that Hanover do WAY Beter compare to Others Brands. Especially the last one. Never had any bug of any kind during a service.
Is nice to be working on such a project. The codeing will take as long as it takes so no end date can be given.
Haven't had time to watch updates in a long time, but we love how this is now feeling both like a museum but also like a hackerspace nowadays.
These are just so cool. Something about being able to see it refresh.
I needed this.
Yay! I unintentionally made it into a video. Great time hanging out with you all
I would love to play with some of these displays!!!
I used to work with devices that used RS485, the drivers were considered "sacrificial" (like a fuse) as it was better for them as a cheap component to take the hit than the more expensive components after them
Several MAX485 chips died on me. I am not sure how many of those were genuine, but I am not aware of doing anything, that should have killed them.
Now you've scratch my itch. flip and dot flip displays have been a dream of mine since kid. I'm still fixed on getting or scratch building my own actually...
A Celluar automata program would look great on that
I love the enthusiasm of the people involved in this, it’s infectious. I wouldn’t mind one of those displays, but I have nowhere to put it.
So glad to see the Eeprom9 back again!!!
EPROM9!!!
love these displays! so cool. Love the sound they make as they flip.
Love to progressively see more of the team behid the museum! This really has grown into a group effort. Great work everyone
Neat!
We need an equivalent of TMINO stateside - such huge appreciation for the work being done to preserve and educate!
Agree. If you're interested in oldschool telephone stuff, the Connections Museum in Seattle will get you some of that vibe. But Sam is unique :)
At 14:00 you're talking about ALFAZETA who make these brand new (in ORANGE too!) and they are not that expensive - a polite email to them will get you a price list. They also make new 7-segment mechanical counters (like the old petrol pump displays). Give em a shout, the boss man is pleasant to chat with ;)
Love flip dots they have fallen out of favour sadly. Great video 2x👍
I maintained the big flip dot display at Curragh Racecourse Ireland, you needed a very long ladder.
Agreed. They have a kind of graceful simplicity that LEDs don't really match. In my town the new bus marquees are amber LEDs trying to compete with the brightness of the sun and over the years of use they all get dimmer and dimmer until a lot of them are unreadable at a distance even at night. In the day or when they age they can't compete with flip dots.
@@fallenshallrise yes the LEDs look nice and modern, but age and fade. The controllers are not always stable and flicker is an issue. . We built both flip and LED signage (plus a couple of other types) but flips were my favourite. 👍 The downside compared to LEDs they are slow especially bigger dots.
@@dcallan812 and often flip dots get stuck in one position. Sometimes a significant mechanical hit can make them flip, but sometimes the DOT is permanently magnetised.
Great to see those old beauties alive and animating
Next time plz also get some up close audio of that gorgeous rattling :D
I blinked twice, and there are already too many new interesting items in the museum. I will have to come back soon.
I wrote some code a while ago to show a clock with seconds and the occasional notification on a flip dot bus route number display which worked for an arbitrary resolution but can't remember where I left the code. I do remember using the pyflipdot library which was very useful though. Interesting seeing you guys solve the same problems but with a different approach, using a bitmap is an especially good idea, I just used a boolean 2D array to represent characters which could then be arbitrarily shown depending on the time or state of my smart home with algorithms to handle auto wrap around and scrolling. I recommend implementing some way of turning it off when nobody is around as the dots are mechanical parts and can wear out.
Awesome video!
I had just started scouring eBay for these last week, thinking that you just don’t see many of them anymore!
It's like a hacker con, not a bottle of shampoo between you and having a ball 🙂 Love to visit if we get to the UK.
Flip top display was used in train stations and airports and even the bee movie with Jerry Seinfeld and Barry Benson.
Cool
Are yes the led display lol 😉
yes good old microsoft paint and LCD assistant. 😂
"That's straight enough, I'm going for it"
I'd love to have a flip-dot display, or even just an e-ink screen. They're so cool! For now though, I just have a 20x4 serial LCD next to my monitor, showing useful info as sort of a personal dashboard.
I have actually a 96×16 hanover flipdot display and i also tried comunicating via rs485 with no luck, so i bought the hanover eric display controller and it still would not work.
In the end it was the mainboard on the display and so luckly the place where i got the first display had another one and if finally works, i love hearing the sound of hundreds of dots flipping at the same time in my workshop.
If you could share the python software it would be amazing i could finally put animations on my flipdot.
I look forward to seeing this interfaced with the exchange somehow :D
My driver program did not have the ability to span multiple panels i just quickly tied all the enable lines high for all 4 panels and they just duplicated the data across them, my test bench only consisted of a single 32x16 panel and a 20x11 panel. i did manage to get it spanning working later on. I think its coffee time :).
Trying to understand this display really is a matter of taking a whole bunch of different inputs and then just connecting the dots.
Looking at the thumbnail, I thought it’s a massive sequencer!
Bad Apple, please!
2:55: You just need a vice and some layers of 2.54mm protoype board so you don't push the contacts and only the body.
I would love to visit the museum but it is a long way from Kentucky and I doubt my good ole Trek could get me there ... hmm... the thought of it does get the gears turning..
I hope you still have the plan to scale this up to the front windows of the museum!
yep we do
I think that "museum" is just like any other hackspace, maybe a bit more vintage and analog tech.
Would be funny to coat a car with those... changing the colour of the car while moving
Flip Flops or Flip Dots ?.. very good.. like it, but when first saw,I was expecting JK flip Flops.
When I was a child, I built a project from practical wireless, with 10 flip flops. All connected together and lit 10 mes light bulbs. It counted pulses up to number 512. Pulses from a telephone dial.
Trying to find the practical wireless page from the sixties, no luck finding yet.
whats that windows/total/norton/midnight commander prog guy runs on lenovo laptop
On each bootup the controller checks how big the display is but the software doesn’t know :)
If I find a way to get that info from the controler I will.
I'd like to see the source for the node/python if you want to share?
Cooooooooooooooool, can't they tie in the MIDI clock signal for you?
Divide it down by 6.
Python urgh, all yours problems there in one word 😂
Cool windows 7 start menu over windows 10
Pong but played across different types of displays…..
2:35 suddenly distracted by the sight of a Yamaha DD-10... my first rather awful drum machine.
Look, mum! A computer-controlled filp dot display with an ironic message!
Now play bad apple on it.
working on it :P
:o)❤
Is that Windows 7 ?!?
But can it run doom
here is the obligatory joke about using nano instead of real text editor.