A developer has built a large interactive wall display using electromagnetic flipdiscs, pairing vintage display technology with an Nvidia Orin Nano and Google's MediaPipe for gesture recognition. The project uses 9 Alfazeta panels in a 3x3 grid, creating an 84x42 disc display that responds to hand gestures and audio input in real time. The creator released two Node.js libraries, flipdisc and flipdisc-server, to handle rendering and scene management.
The hardware setup is straightforward but power-hungry. Each panel needs 24V 1A, requiring a 10A MEAN WELL power supply for the full array. Communication happens over RS485, with the team using three USB RS485 devices to maintain acceptable framerates. The Nvidia Orin Nano handles the ML workload, processing video from an IMX708 camera and audio through a Waveshare board. MediaPipe had to be compiled from source to enable GPU acceleration on the Jetson platform.
The real payoff is the interaction design. Most low-pixel displays pre-render their content. This system runs real-time visualizations using WebGL and canvas, with Python scripts handling MediaPipe inference and sending results back to Node.js via ZeroMQ, a messaging broker often used in agentic systems. Pragmatic architecture, using existing tools rather than building from scratch.
Sourcing flipdisc panels remains a challenge. Alfazeta, an Italian manufacturer, still produces them but primarily serves the transportation industry. The creator notes the panels are expensive and fragile, comparing the discs to butterfly wings. With Docker configs and wiring diagrams included in the documentation, the main barrier now is finding the panels themselves.