HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

We received these beautiful display segments at the 29th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg from the guys at muCCC (http://muc.ccc.de). They didn't provide any information about how to do anything with them, so we had to do just a little reverse engineering. After figuring out the whole circuit-board layout to get an idea of what the developers intended for the interface, we verified our results using an ATmega32 on an AVR NET-IO.
Technically we're able to drive the displays at roughly 10 FPS, which generates a considerable amount of current drawn by the e-magnets flipping the pixel-segments. To satisfy that demand we used the largest capacitor we could find around the hackerspace.

http://wiki.muc.ccc.de/flipdot:start
http://www.bytewerk.org/index.php/Flipdot-Matrix