Would that be 1K woodels? This is a crazy project that almost demands that someone tries to implement an alternative. Of course, you could do it. But first read something about the difficulties.

The idea that you  could create an interesting kinematic display is one that has occurred to many a hardware hobbyist, but this one has 1000 pixels and this is the dominant design factor. When I first contemplated this I thought that the best way would be to use a solenoid or perhaps a servo-actuated pixel but --- One Thousand!!. Even if they only cost $1 a piece that's still $1000. Similar reasoning seems to have dominated Ben Holmen's design choices. He wanted to create a 1K display, and the first problem was finding 1000 anythings that could act as pixels. His first attempt using ping pong balls seems sensible, but buying 1000 balls still isn't cheap and it turned out they were unsuitable for a number of reasons. 

Being a bit of a woodworker, his next thought was to use smallish wooden cubes, but even so creating a 1000 such blocks and then assembling them into a frame was a big task. Consider cutting 10 blocks, drilling holes, painting and mounting in a frame - now do it 100 times.

From the programmer's point of view the most interesting part of the project is the control mechanism. We have already noticed that 1000 actuators isn't econmically reasonable and so we need a single mechanism shared between the blocks. The solution is a plotter style X,Y,Z mechanism. You could use anything, but Ben chose a CNC controller for a milling maching and hence ended up writing the code in gcode, which is that standard for such machines. A Raspberry Pi, what else, was used as the interface via Python and pigpio. The details of the "poking" mechanism are interesting and you can see the whole thing in action:

Yes it is slow - but fun to watch the image emerge. It reminds me of watching a print reveal itself in a developing tray, but perhaps that's just me. 

He says it took 6 years to build - not full time, I imagine.

Ben, courageously in my opinion, made the display available to users via an Internet connection. He reports that there were no rude pictures drawn, but now it is time to retire the service and he plans to use it as a backdrop to video calls.

So can you do better (or different)?

More Information

https://benholmen.com/blog/kilopixel/

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