splitflap

Building Split Flap Displays. Started 18 months ago and kept me on a super interesting learning path. First shot was using open source designs (https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap), but then kept building more and more parts myself. Coming from a software engineering background, getting into designing mechanical things – and then more importantly the electronics around it - has been really challenging, but also very rewarding. At this point I have my own screen printed flaps, custom PCB Design and a, what I consider, really smart protocol that allows me to daisy chain a basically arbitrary number of display elements. It's fun!

I'm building a collator robot [0] to help me pack items I sell for building your own open source split-flap mechanical display [1]. I get custom character flaps printed and die-cut in bulk and then sell them in smaller sets. A full set of flaps for one module has 52 distinct designs (letters, numbers, symbols, etc) and I get them from the manufacturer grouped by design, so they need to be collated to sell as packs of 52 with 1 of each design. My WIP robot will take a stack of one design and distribute them to a bunch of cubbies, then I'll swap in the next design, and so on, so each cubby ends up with a full set. It's based on a cheap ~$110 CNC gantry frame from AliExpress and a ~$35 BTT SKR Pico 3d printer main board running GrblHAL. To detect whether the flaps feed successfully I use a visible light break-beam sensor (the typical IR sens