splitflap VS Synergy

You might want to check out Scottbez's open source split flap display project (https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap). I've also been interested in replicating/streamlining this someday since I don't like the idea of manually applying vinyl lettering to all the PVC cards.

There is a wonderful resource for a DIY option here: https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap

https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap Found this long time ago, but is too complex for me

For what it's worth, I've been keeping an I on https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap for some displays. At some point they have a easy version.

I was looking at these the other day - in the process of browsing around the subject I found this maker-project to create custom ones:

https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap

This is based off the splitflap project, which includes ordering and assembly guides.

Scott Bezek has a great video on "How a Split Flap Display Works" [0].

He also sells blank "flaps" on Tindie [1].

The documentation on how to build the Split Flap is also really awesome [2], including how to cut your own flaps [3].

I've been following this project for a while. It's pretty awesome. I estimate about $10 per character (as opposed to the $180/character (!!) another poster mentioned through Alibaba), with a large portion of the cost being the custom cut "flaps" (in small quantities). It seems like the cost could get in the $2-$4 range per character but I couldn't figure out how to do it without a significant amount of labor involved in cutting the flaps.

FYI, there's also a company called Oat Foundry that sells large split-flap displays [4]. I seem to remember the cost being in the $10k+ region but I don't see a price and I could be way off base.

Oh, interesting, I see Vestaboard also has a (smaller) one for around $3k [5].

[0] https://youtu.be/UAQJJAQSg_g

[1] https://www.tindie.com/products/scottbez1/blank-split-flap-d...

[2] https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap/wiki

[3] https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap/wiki/Cut-flaps

[4] https://www.oatfoundry.com/split-flap/

[5] https://shop.vestaboard.com/products/vestaboard

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.

It's a lot of fun!

[1] https://github.com/fastmail/synergy

[2] Token in the "arcade token" sense, not "authorization token"

[3] https://dev.joewoods.dev/img/vesta-show-20211124.png — note my sloppy normalization of the brightness of the cells