Re:Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can b...
by bensmoif on Saturday July 25, 2026 @02:40PM
(#49050345)
It's stunning. The video speaks for itself. Please scale this up, like way up back of a truckbed size. This would be delightful to see spinning and running IRL.
Then get a grant and make one as wide as a city street
Re:Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can b...
by lstodd on Saturday July 25, 2026 @03:03PM
(#49050551)
about the same idea as nipkow disk
nowadays when people don't want to go the rotating led bar way, which requires very high density led strips (hundreds of ~200-400 mil smd leds) and the accordingly complex control circuitry (basically an FPGA per bar + high speed bus, etc), they do nipkow disk but with individual leds instead of holes. this way you can get away with tens of leds while still having a reasonable sized picture and not that much bandwidth to drive it.
edit: another, less sophisticated take is for example
Re:Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can b...
by kitd on Saturday July 25, 2026 @04:23PM
(#49051175)
I mean if you squint hard enough, it's the same idea as a cathode ray tube. Each hole scans across the "screen" for the desired width, then the next hole down takes over, which does the same. Back in the day, you'd get an interrupt when the reset happened, and you could recalculate your sprite position before the next line got scanned.
Very cool seeing this implementation though. Congrats, OP!
Re:Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can b...
by pbronez on Saturday July 25, 2026 @03:45PM
(#49050861)
How do you get the flashing LED synced up to the spinning pinholes? Maybe the motor provides some positioning feedback so you just have to line it up once…
Re:Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can b...
by mikewarot on Saturday July 25, 2026 @10:35PM
(#49054104)
I was especially surprised when the other LEDs joined into the action, to allow multiple separate video streams... it took a minute for me to grok how it was done.
There's nothing stopping this from being a 360 degree display, if there's enough compute to feed the LEDs the right bits.
If the Stepper motors get hard to source, you could always rip apart a 5v BLDC box fan, and feed the motor 3 phase signals.
The video URL doesn't seem to be correct, through. ;)
Oops
I had to lol at the doom scene.
From git history on the readme.md
Then get a grant and make one as wide as a city street
Love it, thank you for sharing and for being inspiring :-)
nowadays when people don't want to go the rotating led bar way, which requires very high density led strips (hundreds of ~200-400 mil smd leds) and the accordingly complex control circuitry (basically an FPGA per bar + high speed bus, etc), they do nipkow disk but with individual leds instead of holes. this way you can get away with tens of leds while still having a reasonable sized picture and not that much bandwidth to drive it.
edit: another, less sophisticated take is for example
https://hackaday.io/project/191947-rotating-led-display/deta...
Very cool seeing this implementation though. Congrats, OP!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoANiFHljGw
I actually have one of those laying around, burned out unfortunately (don't ask).
There's nothing stopping this from being a 360 degree display, if there's enough compute to feed the LEDs the right bits.
If the Stepper motors get hard to source, you could always rip apart a 5v BLDC box fan, and feed the motor 3 phase signals.