We're here at Open Sauce, we're going to mention here and show off all the cool stuff they built. Today we're here with Spencer. Spencer, tell us a little bit about what you built here, because this thing is very intriguing. So here, I've built an electromagnetic flip dot display board. Right here, I have a 28 by 28 array of flip dot panels and each one of these pixels flips and alternates in between two states depending on an electromagnet right behind. And I've hooked this all up. You can see the back of the board here. They're mass manufactured by a company called Alpha Zeta. After figuring out all of the electronics and wiring and how to hook it up with a Raspberry Pi, I set up this simple little web app that allows me to control the board directly. So I can do things like run a sine wave animation. They're so fast, hey? Yeah, that's the fastest I can get them to render in this current state. I can also use my iPad as a little touchscreen to draw all over the board. I can draw a little shape and then start the game of life if I want and see how the animation plays. And otherwise just have fun creating for people. That's so cool. And like, any practical use case you have for it? I think it's a clock. Yeah, so normally when it's in my apartment, it's in this state where I have a clock ticking and in the upper corner I have a second hand just for every second clicking away. It's amazing. I think that's a really good illustration of how it works too. So they're on a little hinge and they're just pivoting based on the magnet, hey? Each individual dot here is just a tiny piece of plastic and it alternates between those two states of black and white depending on the polarity of the electromagnet behind. So cool. I don't know if you guys can hear it through the microphone, but it has like the most calming like clicking sound while it's rotating. Super satisfying. What was the hardest engineering problem you ran into when building this thing and setting it all up? I think the hardest part for me was figuring out how to source all the electronics that weren't working on the display boards. These boards were manufactured in 2011 or 2012, so there's some components that I had to look online to see if I actually needed and I had to order online and solder onto the board. So that was a lot of looking into schematics and finding things online and seeing if it applied to my board that were definitely interesting but pretty difficult to start off. You've done a pretty good job taking something that's otherwise enterprise. I mean, it doesn't get more user-friendly than this. Watching people walk in from the floor and just intuitively go, "Oh, that's something to be proud of." What's one piece of advice you would give to somebody that's hoping to get into making things and being creative like this? I'd say use inspiration. There's a lot of online resources and not just event centers like this where a bunch of makers can get together and showcase their designs, but there's things on all sorts of social media and on like Hacker News and some friends in your community. Find some people that you'd like to make stuff with. Such a cool project. You know I've been on a bit of a thing for analog displays recently, so I might try to track some of these down. Where can everybody find you if they want to learn more about this project? Yeah, if you'd like to follow me, my Instagram is @spencergbruce. My website is spencergbruce.com or spencergb.me. I'll be open sourcing the designs and the programming for this whole project, so if you'd like to follow more, feel free to check me out there. We love that. Awesome. Thanks for taking the time, Spencer. Show us. Of course, thank you.
