We worked on several split-flap art projects: mostly with sourced pieces…
We managed to get our hands on the old main display of the Zürich train station (a beast of 7 tonnes). Most of the elements aren’t alphanumeric but larger words with the destination and departure station names written entirely. The readability was excellent as the text was silkscreened on the PVC blades.
We reprogrammed it and created a choreography without altering the elements (we just measured the “width” of each word to be used as graphical elements) [1]
The new display in the station is now obviously LED based and has many graphical errors and a much sloppier layout (mimicking the old one). The worst part is that now 1/4 of the panel surface is dedicated to advertisement… [2]
_“In January, Penn Station said goodbye to the old sign - known as a Solari board after the Italian company that introduced the machines in the 1950s. Like so many other familiar inventions of the Industrial Age, the flip-flapping signboards are going the way of the steam engine in rail stations around the world…”_
To clarify: the split-flap elements used by the Swiss railway (SBB/CFF/FFS) were produced by Omega Electronics and had the controlling hardware embedded on each element, controlled via RS-485; the older Solaris needed an external controller that drove the stepper motors.
Ah, they had one of these at the Bern train station as well back when I was living in Switzerland (back in 2005-7). Lausanne already had an LED based one, it was kind of a luxury to have an analog display even back then.
Fastmail has one of these in the entryway to our Philadelphia office. It's been a lot of fun playing with the API — so far, we've made an integration with our company's chatbot [1] to manage "board tokens" [2] which allow folks to post to it (without clobbering each other's designs); a web UI to create designs which can be posted using the bot; and a 'vesta show' command, which creates a composite image of each cell of the board to represent the current board state (e.g. [3]) so that our colleagues in Australia and elsewhere can participate.
This is really cool. I saw they emphasized that they were a winner of the "Red Dot Design Award" so I looked up the Red Dot award to find more cool products.
However, the Red Dot website shows 16,844 "winners" in the Product Design category over the past 10 years (Source: https://www.red-dot.org/search ).
Then I looked at their Fee Structure page, which shows registration costs betweene 300 and 650 Euros. You also have to send them the product (for free, of course). If you "win" you have to buy the 3950 Euro "Winner Package": https://www.red-dot.org/pd/participate
Not a bad business for them. Kind of funny to brag about this pay-to-play award on your website, though.
According to their website, for the year 2020, only 1.2% of entries won the Red Dot Award. So perhaps, it's not that easy as paying the registration fee and winning one.
So far it has been an extremely reliable product that was fun to get some scripts running on. I use a raspberry pie with a cron job to update the board with the weather and my daily schedule. Board actually looks extremely repairable for each individual character, and have has no issues with reliability in ~6mo.
API currently is through a rest interface which they have promised to keep free despite charging for plugins shared through their a subscription model. They had promised a native/local API but I have not heard anything from that.
Overall would recommend but it falls in the tech art category for sure.
Agreed it is a solid risk. I want to spend some time with wireshark to see if I can get something of my own going until an official local api is released.
Let me know if you have any questions about the project or split-flaps in general!
I built a big one for a City of Palo Alto art festival recently which was a lot of work but really rewarding: https://youtu.be/g9EPabcxBsM
There were some comments about the Vestaboard cost elsewhere in this thread so I figured I'd mention, my raw BOM cost for that display (108 modules, 40 characters each) was about $2700, so I actually don't find their pricing that crazy when you consider what's happening mechanically inside the display. (short video from inside mine: https://youtu.be/4rBKxy0gwNI)
They're not completely comparable of course - my display was a one-off build without economies of scale from stamped or injection-molded parts, much larger physically, and I had substantial parts of it manufactured in the US - but generally there's just a lot of pieces that add up quickly in cost.
Would love to get one. Would love to get one for almost 3kEUR? Ooof, I don't think so.
Devices that have some physicality to it are always super cool (flip dots). That also makes them very expensive. Super happy to see products like these though.
There's a weird scale thing. Lots of moving parts in a mechanical display? Expensive. Lots of microscopic parts that can only be assembled in a clean room by machines in special locations? Cheap. I guess it's only economy of scale that makes the difference, but still mind blowing.
What use case does this try to solve for? “Connect and Inspire” sounds hand wavy, generous, and quite frankly cheesy. There are many ways to connect and inspire, and a board with many flipping pieces doesn’t sound like a solution.
This product sounds like it’s just a nostalgic gadget more than anything.
Looking at the site, the use case seems mostly "hip and happening company with too much money who want to display some text for all the office to see but think a cheap flatscreen tv looks too cheap".
Huh, interesting; flip boards like these used to be all over things like train stations, but they had to replace them with screens (big challenge, they deal with extreme weather / temperatures) after the company that made and maintained them went under and they ran out of spare / replacement parts.
Some years ago our local chapter of the CCC got hold of some old flipdot panels that originally hung over the Autobahn[0] and they've since been repurposed and with the help of other spaces improved for display, pics at [1] and you might have stumbled over them at the Chaos Communication Congress or other events.
They're actually pretty robust and most obvious malfunctions can be rejiggered manually and it's just one of the magnets.
But yes, the replacement parts are kinda finite unless another stash of old traffic sign hardware is discovered.
Solari [0] was once one of the leading companies in this sector. Their boards were all over the place. They are struggling now to keep it up with the new technologies.
You most likely don't want such a device at home: it likely makes quite a lot of noise, takes quite a lot of space, and is not really useful as an individual. Its use-case is more for a public/semi-public space, for a group of people to see.
I think you have not watched the presentation video and even the dedicated "use case" for home at their site. They are very much advertising for home use as well. https://www.vestaboard.com/home
The split-flap board by Solari di Udine at the TWA Hotel at JFK is fantastic. The building was designed by the famous architect Eero Saarinen and opened in 1962.
This looks beautiful. I love analog tile boards. My favorite greeted the students at NYU ITP every day, a wooden tile "mirror" by Daniel Rozin.
https://youtu.be/kV8v2GKC8WA
While certainly beautiful, this type of needlessly contrived product is a waste of our natural resources. Buyers need to ask themselves is this a morally defensible use of resources, would and LCD be better would e-Ink be better or should we just go without.
Why stop there? Buyers should ask themselves if they need or want anything at all. The responsible course of action would be to buy and use nothing—after all, we wouldn’t want to accidentally pollute more than all the fossil fuel industry or something.
You're right of course, but my point is that you can endlessly chastise people for buying things they do not strictly need under the guise of "not being wasteful" but it comes off as crotchety. Let people enjoy things.
Sadly we can't see that our want for fancy toys now will make food, clean water and shelter (a place to live not affected by heat, drought, flooding, forest fires, snowmageddon, etc) scarcer in the future.
It is a bit of a philosophical question: If the problem is our need for new toys, and stone-age style "bare necessities" living would perpetuate mankind indefinitely (or at least not cause extinction based on actions caused by mankind), would you want to live that kind of lifestyle and doom all future generations to that?
We managed to get our hands on the old main display of the Zürich train station (a beast of 7 tonnes). Most of the elements aren’t alphanumeric but larger words with the destination and departure station names written entirely. The readability was excellent as the text was silkscreened on the PVC blades.
We reprogrammed it and created a choreography without altering the elements (we just measured the “width” of each word to be used as graphical elements) [1]
The new display in the station is now obviously LED based and has many graphical errors and a much sloppier layout (mimicking the old one). The worst part is that now 1/4 of the panel surface is dedicated to advertisement… [2]
[1] https://vimeo.com/224913612
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zuerich_HB_tabellone...