Chris Fenton always loved the idea of objects that could be programmed ‘by hand.’ Think plug boards, or switches, or hand-punched cards. His RotoZipper is a scrolling text display that you can ‘program’ by filling in the squares on its drum with a dry-erase marker.
The RotoZipper is a fairly simple device: An arduino connects to a linear array of 8 infrared emitter / phototransistor pairs, and controls a stepper motor and an 8×8 LED matrix connected via SPI. A 3D-printed drum has a laser-printed grid wrapped around it, and then a layer of transparency-plastic is wrapped on top of that. The drum is then mounted on to a stepper motor, and as the drum spins, the arduino reads a column of pixels at a time and then shifts them onto the SPI display. The effect is like a tiny version of the Motograph “Zipper” (or, I guess, any of the zillion scrolling LED displays you see in shops and such).
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