News from the Odd Side of Technology
P.A.R. is a 37×18 display made from 666 two-sided square tiles. Instead of giving every pixel its own actuator, a single robot moves behind the panel and physically flips individual tiles as needed to draw monochrome pixel art.
Artwork can be submitted through a website, and the machine reproduces it on the physical grid. The CAD models and code are open source. The project was created by Zimm.
Details： Zimm ↗
The Long Clock uses a roughly 2.3-meter rail mounted on the ceiling, with a single hand slowly traveling along it to show the time. It was built so children watching movies would notice time passing through a large visible mechanical movement rather than an alarm.
Mechanically, it is essentially a one-axis CNC machine. The build reuses a roughly three-meter aluminum extrusion, linear rails, a stepper motor and other parts salvaged from older projects. A carriage moves the pointer along an elongated clock face. It was created by freefoote.
The problem was simply not having a clock in the room, and the solution was not to buy one but to mount a 2.3-meter CNC mechanism on the ceiling. The clock itself is harder to ignore than the time.
Details： freefoote ↗
Every time the display updates, a robot has to travel around behind the screen and physically flip the pixels one by one. Refreshing the image has become an actual mechanical chore.