FLIP Fluid on Flip Dots Turns a Simple Pun Into Months of Hard Labor

Mitxela wanted noise. Years of fluid simulations on LEDs had given him mercury-like sloshing on screens and a tiny wearable pendant, yet every version stayed silent. Flip-dot panels solve that problem by themselves. Each pixel is a physical disk with magnets that slaps from black to yellow and back, and a few thousand of those slaps at once sound like water moving in a shallow tray. The name sealed it. FLIP already stood for Fluid Implicit Particle. Putting that algorithm on flip dots was too cool to ignore.

Commercial high-speed flip-dot walls from places like Breakfast Studio may cost a whopping $50,000, and they simply do not bother with smaller budgets. In contrast, Mitxela struck gold when he discovered eight excess Hanover panels from 2007, the most of which had been given after sitting idle in a friend’s stash of antiquated technology. Each panel is 13 dots tall by 28 broad, and 8 of them set up in a 2 by 4 grid provide a reasonable 3000 pixels and a square meter of display space. Mitxela had originally planned a truly massive setup with 18 panels and a giant gimbal system that visitors could use to physically flip the entire thing, but with only two weeks until Electromagnetic Field 2026, he scaled the design back down to 8 panels on a static plywood frame so that the local hackspace’s laser cutter could handle the parts in one go.

Figuring out how to connect the dots proved to be a far greater problem than finding them. The original manufacturing electronics can refresh an entire panel in roughly a second, which is simply too sluggish for the fluid animation Mitxela desired. So he created his own driver boards, which sit on top of the original PCB and are crammed with H-bridge chips, shift registers, and a cheap CH32V003 microcontroller to monitor things via an RS485 link. It took a long time to get all of the solder joints to function on each panel, which there were over 400 of. The copper traces had to be carefully cut with a Dremel and diamond wheel, and the capacitors went through several iterations, from tiny ceramics that kept failing to 47-microfarad electrolytics, and finally to banks of eight 1000-microfarad cans per panel, just to get the 12-volt supply to cope with the massive 50-amp inrush when all the coils fired at the same time. Eventually, the whole device was able to pull more than 10-15 amps from a reworked 40 amp supply. A few dead coils had to be unwound and resoldered, short circuits on the standoffs had to be repaired, and at one point, one of the panels was erected upside down and had to be broken down and rebuilt.

A two-panel prototype was already chugging along smoothly at about 40 frames per second using a Raspberry Pi Pico 2, but the final motherboard is an STM32H7R3 running at 600 MHz and connected up to all eight of the decoder boards, it talks to a throwaway joystick Mitxela picked up from AliExpress (aptly labeled GRAVITY CONTROL) and even listens out for any movement from an accelerometer so the whole thing can respond properly to being physically tilted, and the whole frame weighs in at a quite substantial 15 kg. Viscosity, of course, was adjusted to zero, so the energy just sort of… dribbles away as the particles knock into the walls, and the display eventually settles into all sorts of bizarre, beautiful patterns that look like they belong in an art gallery.

The finished piece sat four days in the EMF lounge tent before anyone began to play with the joystick, and at nite, when the tent was quiet and nobody was troubling the item, the fluid would simply drift into those zero-gravity formations. A handful of the dots proved to be fragile and died owing to dust or over-enthusiastic fiddling by curious observers, but the most were easily repaired. Overall, the parts and boards cost less than five hundred pounds, or a few penny per dot, assuming you ignore the donated panels and the months of sweaty evenings Mitxela spent sweatily soldering it all together. When you consider the time and work required to create it, the commercial price tag appears much more acceptable.
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