Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can build yourself

tobr 67 points 15 comments July 25, 2026
github.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (9 comments)

lagrange77

Absolutely fantastic! The video URL doesn't seem to be correct, through. ;)

iefbr14

Unfortunately the video link points to https://example.com/docs

josh-wrale

I can see this being applied to hubcaps in the future.

bensmoif

It's stunning. The video speaks for itself. Please scale this up, like way up back of a truckbed size. This would be delightful to see spinning and running IRL. Then get a grant and make one as wide as a city street

CrzyLngPwd

Okay, that is genuinely amazing. Love it, thank you for sharing and for being inspiring :-)

lstodd

about the same idea as nipkow disk nowadays when people don't want to go the rotating led bar way, which requires very high density led strips (hundreds of ~200-400 mil smd leds) and the accordingly complex control circuitry (basically an FPGA per bar + high speed bus, etc), they do nipkow disk but with individual leds instead of holes. this way you can get away with tens of leds while still having a reasonable sized picture and not that much bandwidth to drive it. edit: another, less sophisticated take is for example https://hackaday.io/project/191947-rotating-led-display/deta...

pbronez

How do you get the flashing LED synced up to the spinning pinholes? Maybe the motor provides some positioning feedback so you just have to line it up once…

effnorwood

eat it hdmi

mikewarot

I was especially surprised when the other LEDs joined into the action, to allow multiple separate video streams... it took a minute for me to grok how it was done. There's nothing stopping this from being a 360 degree display, if there's enough compute to feed the LEDs the right bits. If the Stepper motors get hard to source, you could always rip apart a 5v BLDC box fan, and feed the motor 3 phase signals.

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