They’re those displays where, when something changes, it makes this amazing clacking sound and the letters all spin around and then is settles down to the new state. You might have seen these in Waterloo Station sometime ago although they’re long gone now. Somewhere in between destination blinds and LEDs we had a period where things were a bit cooler… and we had what was called a split flap display: A split flap display. In vehicles they have this high visibility property and unlike flip dots they are silent and do require constant power (albeit very low power these days). What you see on buses now is LED matrices which are essentially like the sort of things you can buy in maker kits - they have LEDS which are usually a single colour. Buses with LED matrix destination displays. The one above is one that used to take me to school.īuses that you see these days don’t have flip dot displays…. There’s a few buses in this presentation - they’re all Nottingham-based ones which is where I grew up. They were just bits of fabric with the destinations written on, and the driver would wind a handle and around would come the next destination. They were popular for a while because they have a couple of properties we’ll look at in a minute, but historically these were just blinds… A bus with a destination blind. They tell you where the bus is going to go, or what the next stop is or whatever. The purpose of these signs is that they generally serve as destination blinds in buses. It was parted out and I was able to buy the sign. Around the year 2000 it was fitted into a bus… that bus was later scrapped, I’m not sure when.
To answer this, we need to talk about buses a little bit because this thing behind me came out of a bus.
There’s no lights involved here, these are very bright on one side and black on the other and it’s all done with electromagnets.īefore we play around with this some more, we need to go look at “What are these things and where do they come from?”. They make a lovely noise when they change and the other thing that they’ve got going for them is that when they’re not changing they don’t really consume any power. It basically does anything you want - they are usually, or were, used in digital signage. What does it do? Let’s see if we can make it do something… Example text display on a flip dot sign. It weighs quite a lot, it’s difficult to bring to London and navigate the tube, so it’s staying up here in Nottingham and we’re doing this remotely. It’s also extremely heavy, because each one of these dots it electromechanical. For scale, there’s a Raspberry Pi 4 in a box - so it’s quite big.
Before we go any further what we can do is take a look at the thing behind me - it is a flip dot display. This talk is about flip dots and managing a flip dot display with a Raspberry Pi.
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