Details on the Radial Display

So, last night I posted a video cataloging my creation of a radial spinning disk display (that's what I'm calling it anyway). It's not really a new concept or anything, and wasn't particularly hard to make. That's why it was the perfect candidate for the video which I think turned out rather well.

I was so excited about finishing the video, that I decided to post it before I had a proper writeup.  That's what this post is for.

Because you can find details on how a radial spinning disk display (or "hard drive clock") works all over the place, I thought I'd make this sort of a "meta" post and try to catalog not only the project but all of the design decisions (right and wrong) that I made along the way.  If you've been bored stiff by my super technical posts recently, this should be a welcome departure.  I made sure to include tons of photos.

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Super Rapid Prototyping a Radial Hard Disk Display Proof of Concept

So, a friend and I were discussing hard drive clocks Tuesday afternoon, and I somehow got it in my head that I had to build something similar that evening.

I had enough supplies lying around to pull it off, and confident that I could, I decided to do a fun little video.  Ironically, it took longer for me to edit this video than to make the display. Details on the project here.

Ice Breaker v1.1

So, a few weeks ago, I made a gadget that I called the "Ice Breaker".  It was a simple persistence of vision toy that would spell out the word "Hello" on your hand as you wave to someone.  The original didn't work too well, so I made a new version that works great!  Here's a video:

Stick around until the end to see what was going on with the old version.

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