Hack Modular's "Mechanical GIF" Puts a 1960s RAF Plane Instrument to Work as an Animation Display
Originally designed to indicate when a device was in the raised position, this old piece of aircraft tech is now a three-frame video tool.
Pseudonymous vintage electronics enthusiast "Hack Modular," hereafter simply "Modular," has created a physical animated GIF of sorts — using technology originally found in the cockpit of Royal Air Force (RAF) planes flying in the 1960s.
"[This is] a magnetic indicator from the cockpit of an RAF aircraft. It uses a rack and pinion mechanism to spin these little display faces," Modular explains of the instrumentation display repurposed for animation use. "The rack is the long linear gear, and as that moves across it spins the circular pinion gears. What I really wanted to know is, is it possible to put my own images on those display faces — and the answer was yes."
Originally, the device in question was used to flip between two static images depending on the aircraft's status: black slashes over a white background and the word "UP" in capital letters. Stripes and "UP" were plenty for the RAF at the time, but Modular sought to make something a little more interesting — dismantling the gadget and replacing the artwork with his own.
The indicators offer three faces, meaning it's technically possible to create a simple animation — albeit one three frames long. "These stills are taken from a series of collotype photographs by Eadweard Muybridge," Modular explains of his chosen frames — picked from a famous set of photographs showing a horse and jockey galloping side-on, taken to settle a bet that all four legs do indeed leave the ground at once. Some relay circuitry and a speed control system, allowing the user to control the "speed" of the horse, completed the build, providing what Modular describes as "the mechanical GIF."
More information on the project is available on Modular's YouTube channel, along with a video going into more depth on the operation of the indicators.