Pledge: Flip Dots for a display

I'm building a flip dot display for the space. If people pledge more, we can have a bigger display! Pledge opened: 22 July 2013

Pledge leader: Nick Johnson

The item

One box of dots will let me build a 90 x 7 display, enough to show 15 characters at a time (5 column characters with 1 column between them). Longer messages can be displayed with scrolling or refreshing. The display will be approximately 10cm tall and 135cm wide. I'd like to mount it at the space and hook it up in a similar manner to the current board. I plan to fabricate a backboard and a transparent faceplate out of acrylic on the laser cutter; for anyone concerned about noise, I'm reliably assured that the faceplate will cut down noise quite substantially, and I can enforce update rate limits if necessary.

I already have a design for the driver PCB, and I'll be sending it out for PCB fab in the next few days - before I go off on holiday on Wednesday, hopefully.

I'm paying for a box of strips - enough for the dimensions above - on my own, but they're expensive. Would anyone like to chip in for more to make a bigger, more awesome display? The strips come to 4 euro each; with 90 in a box that means that for each extra £372 after VAT, we can add another 15 characters to the display. Since we can get partial boxes, each £25 gets us an extra character. I'll cover the cost of PCBs, acrylic, drivers etc.

Budget estimation

£25 for every additional character

Specification

Show awesome messages!

Additional information

• <anything else>

Pledges

• £310 - Nick Johnson
• £25 - Dean Forbes
• £25 - Spike

Running total: £360

Approximate target: £930