How to Animate a Flip-Digit Display
AlfaZeta sells new flip-digits in a variety of styles, and Ksawery Kirklewski has a guide on how to animate them.
Flip-dot displays seem to be trending in the maker community, and we’ve recently covered a few different projects that utilize them. Flip-dot displays are electromechanical devices that use small plastic dots like the pixels of a digital display. Those dots are attached to a mechanism that lets you flip them over to make them visible. Flip-digit displays work in a similar way, but with seven line segments that form a digit in place of the dots. Not many companies still make flip-digit displays, because seven-segment LEDs are more practical. But AlfaZeta does sell new flip-digits in a variety of styles, and Ksawery Kirklewski has a guide on how to animate them.
You don’t have to animate your flip-digit displays to use them. You can simply flip each segment on or off to display whatever information you need to. But flip-digit displays are pretty darn impractical, which means that almost everyone using them today is doing so for the retro aesthetic — an aesthetic that can be improved with animations. Even if you don’t want any animations, Kirklewski’s guide will help you control the AlfaZeta flip-digit displays for traditional purposes. That’s a bit more complicated than controlling a seven-segment LED display, so this guide could be very helpful.
To follow this guide, you’ll need a 4x7 flip-digit display panel from AlfaZeta. They don’t have an online store, so you have to mail or fax them to place an order. You can also purchase a used flip-digit display if they have similar control requirements to the AlfaZeta displays. In addition, you’ll need an Ethernet-RS485 converter, a computer to control the display, a USB network adapter if you don’t have an Ethernet port on that computer, and the appropriate cables and power supplies. Once your hardware is setup, you’ll use animation software that Kirklewski programmed in Processing to control the display. That will let you animate individual segments or display numbers and some letters — though letters often look wonky with only seven segments.