I’d been wanting to build a split-flap display for a while. Back in 2020 I started gathering parts for Scott Bezek’s design - the laser-cut version with custom PCBs. I bought a bunch of 12V 28BYJ-48 stepper motors and hall-effect sensors and then… life happened, and the project sat in a box.

Fast forward to 2025, and I decided to actually finish this thing. But, the thing which kept me from finishing the project during the pandemic was still relevant: cutting out and labeling hundreds of individual flaps wasn’t a very appealing use of time. Thankfully, there’s more mechanical design out there these days. I modified a 3D-printed design from Makerworld, designed and built some custom electronics, and with a bit of debugging I have a fully working display! Here’s the finished product:

A note from July 6, 2018

When I was in high school, I wrote a short post on building a low-cost Arduino on a breadboard. It’s been quite some time since I’ve done any significant hardware hacking, but since my old blog is mostly dead at this point I reproduce that post here

I’ve burnt out a few Arduinos recently, and have found it expedient to just build my own on a breadboard rather than pay $34.95 and buy an Arduino Duemilanove online. It’s cheaper ($7.40, without FTDI or breadboard, SparkFun), and easy to fix if something goes wrong. Note that this tutorial does NOT include a voltage regulator, power will come from the FTDI board.