Hearing all the folks in the background enjoying the museum made me smile! ... and jealous that they're there and I'm across an ocean 😢

When we first introduced these flip dots for Railway Departure boards in the '80s we had a lot of trouble with dirt making the dots stick. This was solved by having a dot reversing programme run over all dots at around 2am for about 15 mins to repeatedly exercise all dots to keep the pivot points mobile and the air draft from them all moving to blow away loose dust and dirt.

What excellent happy chaos! "Where's the stool?", asks Sam, as he walks past a folded step ladder in the corner 😅❤

Company in the Czech Republic called BUSE still makes Flip-DOT modules and displays :) They also have a version with integrated LED's and call it DOT-LED (BS210 model).

The world needs more nerds! Fantastic :)

Yeah, you’ve got to love the dots

Haven't had time to watch updates in a long time, but we love how this is now feeling both like a museum but also like a hackerspace nowadays.

Had a friend who manages the largest (at the time) flip dot display for Coca Cola in Atlanta. That thing was loud! Cool to see this one going up in the museum

These are just so cool. Something about being able to see it refresh.

Is nice to be working on such a project. The codeing will take as long as it takes so no end date can be given.

Yay! I unintentionally made it into a video. Great time hanging out with you all

In Stockholm they have a busfront with flipdot display set up in their transport museum. You can choose the text shown on it with a touchscreen, options include "mordor" or the Swedish word for "sofa" besides other more serious or funny "destinations"

I had the HUGE chance to salvage a complete Hanover Displays kit on a decommissioned bus at one of my ex company. 3 Flip Dot Displays, a Front one that is almost 2.5 Meters wide Made of 4 Modules Like shown in the video, a Side one, a Back one and Others random Displays in case I break one of the 3 above or if I want to mess Something. Also all the cables and a DERIC+ Controller. The Controller Can be reprogrammed with any RS 232 port and the Helen3.3 Software ist easily findable one the Internet. And as a bus driver, I Can tell you that Hanover Displays is the best destination Display system I ever encountered by far ! Ease to use, functionalities, ease of programming and reliability are the 4 Factors that Hanover do WAY Beter compare to Others Brands. Especially the last one. Never had any bug of any kind during a service.

Now you've scratch my itch. flip and dot flip displays have been a dream of mine since kid. I'm still fixed on getting or scratch building my own actually...

I would love to play with some of these displays!!!

I'm no expert in Python, but those maps you're hardcoding could probably be read in by the actual bitmap and scrub for black and white to generate your true/false mappings. I don't have an implementation in mind, but I'd start with reading in the file and seeking row by row for black and white bits for true and false. Love this idea so much. Thanks for putting so much effort into this guys.

I love the enthusiasm of the people involved in this, it’s infectious. I wouldn’t mind one of those displays, but I have nowhere to put it.

So glad to see the Eeprom9 back again!!!

A Celluar automata program would look great on that

I used to work with devices that used RS485, the drivers were considered "sacrificial" (like a fuse) as it was better for them as a cheap component to take the hit than the more expensive components after them