Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display

Overall reaction

• Commenters are overwhelmingly delighted, calling the display absurd, useless, beautiful, and exactly the kind of passion project they want to see.
• Many praise the long, detailed write-up and perseverance over six years as a celebration of building for its own sake.
• A minority dismiss it as a “waste of time,” highlighting a tension between pure hobby projects and utilitarian motivation.

Cost, power, and “calm tech”

• Multiple comments joke about this being the most expensive cost-per-pixel display, but the builder explicitly values the learning and experience over money.
• The “zero power when static” aspect is repeatedly compared to e‑ink and “calm technology”; some want more devices that change at human, not computer, timescales.

Mechanics, noise, and algorithms

• People love the cleverness of the flexible glue-stick “poking” mechanism and the Wheel-of-Fortune–style cube turning.
• Noise is reported as surprisingly low due to microstepping and good motor drivers; clunks happen mainly on misalignment.
• Several discuss path-planning algorithms: computing pixel diffs between frames and finding shortest paths to minimize travel time, potentially ordering images or videos (e.g., “Bad Apple”) by edit distance to speed rendering.

Pixel design and extensions

• Suggestions include using all four faces for grayscale or color; some question why sensors are needed if orientation is tracked.
• Others propose edge-on cubes, prisms, hexagons, or triangles to encode multiple simultaneous images or more colors, referencing De Bruijn sequences and existing “trivision” billboards.

Related work and alternative mechanisms

• Many link analogous mechanical/kinetic displays: wooden mirrors, mechanical billboards, marble and ping-pong ball art, binary counters, split-flap boards, linotype machines, pin displays, magnetic-ball boards, and commercial products like Vestaboard.
• Some propose faster or simpler mechanisms: flaps instead of cubes, per-column rotation shafts, electromagnets and hidden magnets in pixels, or even non-rewritable “displays” based on thermal printers and thermochromic/erasable inks.

Use cases, UX, and moderation

• People imagine it in coffee shops, airports, Zoom backgrounds, or as a “calm” art object.
• Viewers offer site/stream UX feedback (clearer photos, attribution, galleries, better frame rate) and discuss content moderation, referencing previous adversarial-image projects and joking about classifiers for offensive pixel art.