--- title: Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can... description: Scanwheel is a DIY drum-style mechanical television project using a Raspberry Pi Pico. It features five 9mm×8mm windows driven by a single scanning drum with... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/scanwheel-is-a-drum-style-mechanical-television-you-can-build-yourself-vtt1llsyb twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can build yourself | daily.dev og:description: Scanwheel is a DIY drum-style mechanical television project using a Raspberry Pi Pico. It features five 9mm×8mm windows driven by a single scanning drum with... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/scanwheel-is-a-drum-style-mechanical-television-you-can-build-yourself-vtt1llsyb og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/VTT1lLsYb.png og:image:alt: Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can build yourself og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can build yourself **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 4 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Scanwheel is a DIY drum-style mechanical television project using a Raspberry Pi Pico. It features five 9mm×8mm windows driven by a single scanning drum with separate LEDs per window and 20 scan lines. The Pico's PIO hardware drives the LEDs for high horizontal resolution. The build requires a stepper motor, A4988 StepStick driver, capacitor, LEDs, and resistors. 3D-printed parts (base, drum, lid) are provided along with OpenSCAD models. Software runs on MicroPython 1.28, with device drivers and PC-side tools for video streaming and image conversion. A Pico W enables wireless streaming. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 22 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-07-25). **TL;DR:** The community is enthusiastic and impressed by this spinning pinhole/LED display project, with most comments expressing admiration and curiosity; a minor recurring issue was a broken video link in the post. **Sentiment:** 75% positive · 20% mixed · 5% skeptical **The case for** - Commenters found the video demonstration genuinely impressive and delightful, especially the Doom scene. - Several commenters expressed excitement about scaling the concept up (hubcaps, truck-bed size, city-street scale). - The project is seen as an inspiring, creative implementation of a classic scanning-display concept. **The pushback** - The video URL in the post was broken/pointing to example.com, frustrating early viewers. - The disclaimer 'Avoid use in operations' was noted with mild irony by a commenter. **By community** - hackernews (positive): Commenters are broadly enthusiastic and impressed, with technical curiosity about synchronization and historical context (Nipkow disk, CRT analogy), tempered only by a broken video link. **Open questions** - How is the flashing LED synchronized to the spinning pinholes — does the motor provide positioning feedback? **Highlights** > 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... > — [lstodd on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49050551) > I mean if you squint hard enough, it's the same idea as a cathode ray tube. Each hole scans across the "screen" for the desired width, then the next hole down takes over, which does the same. Back in the day, you'd get an interrupt when the reset happened, and you could recalculate your sprite position before the next line got scanned. Very cool seeing this implementation though. Congrats, OP! > — [kitd on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49051175) > 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 > — [bensmoif on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49050345) > 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… > — [pbronez on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49050861) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047707) · 39 points · 22 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Scanwheel: A Pocket-Sized POV TV](https://daily.dev/posts/scanwheel-a-pocket-sized-pov-tv-otkna0caj) · Hackaday · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Someone used four LED strips to create a 'screen' by spinning them around really quickly](https://daily.dev/posts/someone-used-four-led-strips-to-create-a-screen-by-spinning-them-around-really-quickly-9bf2bwvxw) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#python](https://daily.dev/tags/python), [#hardware](https://daily.dev/tags/hardware) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/scanwheel-is-a-drum-style-mechanical-television-you-can-build-yourself-vtt1llsyb) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can build yourself","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/scanwheel-is-a-drum-style-mechanical-television-you-can-build-yourself-vtt1llsyb","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/scanwheel-is-a-drum-style-mechanical-television-you-can-build-yourself-vtt1llsyb"},"datePublished":"2026-07-25T19:31:58.600Z","dateModified":"2026-07-25T23:02:34.731Z","description":"Scanwheel is a DIY drum-style mechanical television project using a Raspberry Pi Pico. It features five 9mm×8mm windows driven by a single scanning drum with...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/407681901c45898c9d64651047c8f235?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/407681901c45898c9d64651047c8f235?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/scanwheel-is-a-drum-style-mechanical-television-you-can-build-yourself-vtt1llsyb","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"python,hardware","timeRequired":"PT4M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can build yourself"}]} ```