I happen to own a physical pong table. Everyone loves it. [0] There is something magical about material and only-does-one-thing instantiations of digital things.
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I am really looking forward to a flat table top screen consisting of millions of magnetically-controlled vertical-extruding rod pixels, with actual color controlled pixels along their length. For an amazing table display/extrusion of D&D dungeons and terrain, for miniatures.
A little sensor ability, and when the extrusion "scrolls" laterally, it could create little lips that move the miniatures too, so they stay "in place". And move NPCs around at the DMs direction. Now turn of the room lights, and use the light pixels not just for color, but for lighting effects like wall lamps flickering, add spooky position-distributed sounds...
That has to be coming soon, right?
Some part of me wants to describe it Claude, iterate, and say "Now polish that design, economically optimize the parts, link in the supply chain, and ship me the first review unit." That has to be coming soon, right?
The lines separating planes of reality, they are a blurring, quickly.
A much cheaper way might have been to buy a couple of Novation Launchpads. 8x8 full RGB tactile buttons for 90€, MIDI-controllable. Four of those next to another for 16x16 at 360€ plus a little bit for cables and controller comes out at 1/3 the price
Totally off-topic, and I may be wrong, but I immediately loved the non-LLM writing-style and felt glued to the content just through the writing alone. It's getting rare.
I saw one in a computer museum in Switzerland. It was a much larger field, it was just large orange LEDs (or were they tubes?), but it also cycled between a dozen of different cell automata games. Something about being able to see individual "pixels" made it really mesmerizing.
> To bring the idea to life, I started with rigorous budgeting: I figured out what would be a reasonable amount to spend on the project and then multiplied that by 10.
Wow, in switches alone this would cost me $1200! Which actually isn't that bad for a one off-like this with easily available components - I've seen worse. You can of course take your chances with Aliexpress Specials but be warned: some of those cheap switches are cheap switches (sometimes, they're barely even switches). And you won't be getting them inside of 2 weeks.
I think I would have tried mechanical keyboarding switches that can take an LED and a clear keycap. Not really the same effect, but you could probably have gotten out to 24x24 for the same price.
Technology Will Save Us, from a brighter past, produced the Arcade Coder as their swan song. It had 12×12 tactile buttons with color leds inside, a companion app to program it with scratch like code blocks, and interactive tutorials. It's ESP32 based.
There's an effort to continue it's life, ast the app was on the app store for a brief time. https://github.com/padraigfl/twsu-arcade-coder-esp32
When I was a teenager, I read a book about assembly language for the commodore and implemented the game of life in a really simple way. I just used the text screen. To switch on a cell, I would put an asterisk ('*') in it. Then I could run my machine code program and it would evolve according to the rules of the game of life.
This isn't what this is about, but I wonder if anyone has created a fully mechanized version of Conway's Game of Life. The fact that you only have to follow 4 rules, and each cell only needs to observe its neighbors to follow those rules, makes me wonder if it's possible to track these things mechanically. I unfortunately don't know enough about mechanical engineering to do such a thing.
85 comments
I happen to own a physical pong table. Everyone loves it. [0] There is something magical about material and only-does-one-thing instantiations of digital things.
——
I am really looking forward to a flat table top screen consisting of millions of magnetically-controlled vertical-extruding rod pixels, with actual color controlled pixels along their length. For an amazing table display/extrusion of D&D dungeons and terrain, for miniatures.
A little sensor ability, and when the extrusion "scrolls" laterally, it could create little lips that move the miniatures too, so they stay "in place". And move NPCs around at the DMs direction. Now turn of the room lights, and use the light pixels not just for color, but for lighting effects like wall lamps flickering, add spooky position-distributed sounds...
That has to be coming soon, right?
Some part of me wants to describe it Claude, iterate, and say "Now polish that design, economically optimize the parts, link in the supply chain, and ship me the first review unit." That has to be coming soon, right?
The lines separating planes of reality, they are a blurring, quickly.
——
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84Ymt9BAq5s
> I figured out what would be a reasonable amount to spend on the project and then multiplied that by 10.
I like the way you think.
> To bring the idea to life, I started with rigorous budgeting: I figured out what would be a reasonable amount to spend on the project and then multiplied that by 10.
Lol, this is the way to do hobbies
I think I would have tried mechanical keyboarding switches that can take an LED and a clear keycap. Not really the same effect, but you could probably have gotten out to 24x24 for the same price.
https://www.core64.io/