I’ve been wanting to make a 1:220 scale megacity diorama and don’t know what options I have. I’m projecting I’ll need to control the speed of two motors, some LEDs, and maybe a dozen or so tiny screens as digital billboards. It’s the screens I’m worried most about.
I’d like to scavenge digital displays from e-waste, group them by type/resolution, and have a slideshow for each group that rotates throughout the city.
My initial idea was to use digital photo frames, but they’re too big, and used ones are still too expensive for the quantity I need.
I’m assuming I will need multiple controllers(/processors?), but I don’t know enough terminology to find what I need. I’m still thinking out the diorama, so if it’s too hard/expensive I can just do backlit decals, but that’s boring.
I think if you don’t already have a more solid plan than that, then this project is probably too complicated for now, and you might start with a single display. If the origina megacity is 22 miles across (fairly small for a megacity) then 1/220th of that is 1/10th of a mile which is pretty huge. A standard 48 foot billboard would scale to 2.6 inches wide.
It’s a quasi-solid plan, lol. Most of the planning I’ve done has nothing to do with the question, so I left it out.
The diorama is only depicting a section of a larger, cyberpunk flavor city, and it’s going to sit on a 3ft2 card table. One of the motors is gonna drive an elevated rail with reed switches so it pauses at the stops, and the other motor is gonna drive continuous traffic from hell on the surface level. All that is already something I know how to do with older tech. It’s a homebrew variation on the Magnorail system, if you want to know more.
I’m aiming for the itty bitty displays, like you see in vapes and toys and shit. I might be able to fit a couple big ones on buildings like Times Square vibes, but generally not more than 3".
I might be insane, tbd.
Well, MCU programming and hardware is another thing to know about ahead of time, but ok. There are tons of displays of all sizes on waveshare.com if you want. Tons more on aliexpress. A standard large billboard is apparently 48 ft wide (per web search) so you’d want to scale accordingly. Maybe with e-ink to simulate a reflective billboard. OLED’s would be for neon signs and stuff.
I like the Raspberry Pi Pico because it’s very well documented, but yeah, ESP32 stuff might be cheaper.
Post some pics when it’s working!