mitxela builds a FLIP fluid simulation on salvaged Hanover flipdot panels for EMF2026—drive electronics, power, eight-panel install, and the pun that started it.
Here's the story of how I put a FLIP fluid simulation on a flipdot electromechanical display. FLIP stands for Fluid Implicit Particle, and yes, the primary motivation behind doing this was the wordplay. Built as an installation for EMF2026.
Flippin' fluid simulations
LED fluid sims are silent — flipdots make the swishing noise for you. Commercial flipdot art installs start around $50,000. After being turned down for access to an existing display, the path was: salvage Hanover panels, reverse-engineer drive electronics, and build something tileable and fast.
Path to some panels
Panels came via Sam (Look Mum No Computer) — 13×28 Hanover units (date code 2007), awkward edge PCBs that prevent seamless tiling, and original drivers that take ~1 second to update.
Connect the dots / drive electronics
Key insight (from mikeselectricstuff): dots need only ~1 ms pulses to polarise cores even though mechanical flip takes ~60 ms. Matrix scanning causes visible artefacts; the path chosen was per-dot drive on the existing boards.
Mike’s H-bridge + 595 approach inspired a series-capacitor half-bridge design using cheap motor H-bridge chips in single-ended fashion, doubling dots per shift register, with latch/enable tricks for BJT quiescent current. KiCad hierarchical row layouts, CH32V003 per panel, later RS485 frame sync.
Power is brutal: flipping many dots at once can demand tens–hundreds of amps for milliseconds — solved with distributed electrolytics (≈0.5 F class total), XT60 / LiPo testing, and a quieted 40 A 12 V brick.
Scaling to eight panels
Prototype: 28×26 on two panels with a Pico 2 running FLIP ~40 FPS. Full install: eight panels (~15 kg plywood frame), decoder boards with IDs, STM32H7R3 motherboard, analog arcade joystick over MIDI-style DIN + local ADC MCU, VESA stand after gimbal dreams met the calendar.
Dead pixels, conformal coating, coil repairs with tweezers, and endless soldering ensued. Total hardware cost under £500 (~£0.17/dot) — not counting time.
The Event
Installed in EMF’s lounge tent for the flip sound; ran four days. Gym-ball “gimball” experiments for physical tilting. PCB designs published for others with matching Hanover panels.
Conclusion
A pun-driven electromechanical fluid sim that actually shipped — and a reminder why commercial flipdot walls cost five or six figures once labour is priced in.