Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can build yourself

6 hours ago (github.com)

It's stunning. The video speaks for itself. Please scale this up, like way up back of a truckbed size. This would be delightful to see spinning and running IRL.

Then get a grant and make one as wide as a city street

How do you get the flashing LED synced up to the spinning pinholes? Maybe the motor provides some positioning feedback so you just have to line it up once…

Okay, that is genuinely amazing.

Love it, thank you for sharing and for being inspiring :-)

about the same idea as nipkow disk

nowadays when people don't want to go the rotating led bar way, which requires very high density led strips (hundreds of ~200-400 mil smd leds) and the accordingly complex control circuitry (basically an FPGA per bar + high speed bus, etc), they do nipkow disk but with individual leds instead of holes. this way you can get away with tens of leds while still having a reasonable sized picture and not that much bandwidth to drive it.

edit: another, less sophisticated take is for example

https://hackaday.io/project/191947-rotating-led-display/deta...