Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can build yourself

Scanwheel

Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can build yourself.

It features five windows side by side, each taking advantage of the same scanning drum, but with separate LEDs to allow separate images. The windows are a luxurious 9mm x 8mm each, with 20 scan lines.

The software uses the Pico's PIO hardware to drive the LEDs, allowing extremely high horizontal resolution, so the image quality is a lot better than the 20p line count would imply.

There's an accompanying video showing the build process, with footage of it in action.

Parts

You'll need the following components:

Symbol Technologies 21-02485 stepper motor Old but still widely available online. It has an unusual wiring setup, but it can be used as a bipolar stepper motor by cutting the white wire before it goes into the 4 pin connector as described here.

A4988 based StepStick Something like the Pololu 1182. There's a potentiometer to adjust the current limit. Turn it down as low as it will go before the motor stops turning - it will be almost at the bottom end of the pot's range.

100uF Capacitor Across motor power & ground.

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