Worlds Largest Open-Source Ferrofluid Display - Fetch #8

[@crowdrctrl]

“Snake” would be a great game project, perhaps...

[@harviecz]

Also tetris or space invaders :-) Also this seems to be well suited for implementing game called "world of goo"

[@TroySchrapel]

Snake could work, except new "apples" would need to be raised into position from the bottom. Or you could build a border and have an apple pull into position from anywhere in the border?

[@ianmalcolm177]

Pulling the apples up could actually be a pretty cool effect

[@alvin41712]

Maybe Pong

[@UnderscoreEightHundred]

@@harviecz The world of goo was my childhood

[@TamDNB]

here from wintergatan, this project is so f'n cool

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Thank you!

[@szymek1567]

Thank you for open sourcing this :*

[@Metalguy40]

This is absolutely amazing! Came here after Martin’s MMX video.

[@verypotato6699]

Metalguy40 same

[@AnandKumar-vz9kk]

Me too

[@thekillingmachine4967]

Just saw this on reddit, what an incredible project, awesome work!

[@captainmaay]

This is too insanely cool, I desperately need to build one for myself ! It’s going to take me years... but so be it... it’s now on my bucket list

[@artinacart8035]

Incredible! This seems like something someone would wanna patent and keep under wraps, but making it open source is just awesome. This kinda stuff inspires me

[@GiGaSzS]

Just beautiful :O BTW Wintergatan brought me here ;)

[@gamingbud926]

NASA? Sweet! Congrats on the internship! I hope we'll be able to hear about some of the stuff you'll be doing there. :) So happy to see the version 1.0 final product!

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Thanks, Bud! I really hope I’ll be able to tell you about it as well! -Simen

[@risfutile]

fetch-final-final... oh man, what a classic! 😂 Fantastic job guys!

[@peacockmoss1491]

This is amazing! Also one suggestion for a game is two player ping pong.

[@thesuperginge1348]

"Stop trying to make Fetch happen!" Really cool guys, well done!

[@Chriss2370]

Yes, yes very well done indeed. Very emotional!

[@hashkafe]

this is the coolest project ive ever seen

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Thank you, glad you enjoyed it!

[@kiranseusanker2426]

I think a clock is a great place to start with a ferrofluid display, you can improve small thing over time as tech improves. I would personally love to see snake on the display

[@testingbeta7169]

this is seriously impressive

[@icedrago6500]

Whoa, so cool, subbed! You can also turn that into an abstract display when you play music

[@gerriepretorius4642]

Coming from Wintergatan. Very impressed by your machine

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Thank you!

[@qu1j0t3]

Love this project. Others have suggested "Snake" games but don't forget "Centipede"!

[@lukekamrath8795]

As soon as I saw it on Wintergatan I thought "I want one of those." and "How would I make it." Job done its open source SUPER AWESOME. A while back i watched a NileRed ferro-fluid video, he talked about how high quality ferro-fluid is not a mix of oil and iron, but nano-particles of iron with a special oil like coating that makes the particles not stick together. He makes some of his own and I think he just put it in a glass bottle with water and it never stuck to the sides. Long tall display to make tetris.

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Thanks, and welcome to our channel! Saying that ferrofluid basically is an oil with iron particles is a slight simplification, but not incorrect. We just want to get the point across that it reacts to a magnetic field, not explain the scale of those particles or that they’re coated in oleic acid to avoid clumping - those details are just not important for what we want to convey in this video :) we do love NileRed’s ferrofluid videos though, and hope we get the chance to make some from scratch ourselves one day!

[@Cairo_666]

Amazing! Great work, I hope to see more of this in the future. I think a good game to play on it would be the classic Snake game.

[@monberg2000]

Came from Wintergatan - will stick around :)

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Glad to have you here!

[@JRwhite1991]

Here from Wintergatan, awesome project and congratulations on the internship! PS Flappy Bird xD

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Thank you!

[@ericofire]

this is incredible

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Thank you!

[@bernard2735]

You had me at ‘Applied Procrastination’. Like and subscribed.

[@asheshshrestha]

super awesome.. congrats for hard and successful work

[@johnolivera2369]

god, its like magic...WONDERFUL!

[@playonwoods]

Saw your shoutout on Martin's channel. I can't wait to catch up on your content! I'm going to love it here.

[@namila007]

wow this is so cool. nice work guys

[@crazyegga]

Love It! Please implement "Pong". If you can draw from a bigger fluid tank, even Tetris or Snake might be possible!

[@mskiptr]

Thank you for making it so awesome (and open)!

[@TheViralInfekT]

What a awesome idea. It looks great.

[@foxpup]

Black and White Digital Lava Lamp - That's what this feels like. :-) Gr00vy Man!

[@migfer7]

amazing project.

[@1337treats]

Your constraint of only being able to pull ferrofluid up from the bottom could be mitigated by hiding additional electromagnets along the frame which would allow you to drop ferrofluid down from the top or pull it in from the sides. Just a thought. I'd love to see you guys experimenting with more resolution. What would it look like to have a wave of ferrofluid fading across the display?

[@theDisasternauts]

Great work, just awesome!

[@danielawesome36]

In an alternate timeline, this was how televisions worked. Until the discovery of LED's that is.

[@g.o.j._productions]

dude iits been 3 years.

[@jasonl3445]

So awesome!

[@danielbrazell]

I wanna play Doom on this.

[@dandejy6520]

Actually more suitable for space invaders !

[@tomikun8057]

bad apple

[@ChrisM243]

Wintergatan brought me here as well. I immediately thought of "World of Goo" seeing this Ferrofluid.

[@gazzacroy]

wow.. now that's really cool guys.

[@derekflynn6431]

Not many projects out there that are this unique, amazing job guys I’m seriously considering trying to build my own.

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Please let us know if you do! :)

[@BlueMastic]

That is a really nice way to display things, not just as a clock. Also as a game suggestion: "Tetris upside-down" As the pixels need to start from the bottom but can go up this should be possible i think.

[@NicksStuff]

This is magnificent

[@reedpropes2037]

Pac-Man!!! Or galaga, but you’d have to have a reservoir at top with a larger tank by flipping and leaving on a few rows of magnets then dragging a few at a a time down, but I’d LOVE to see galaga. I’d also love to see live/ wireless phone programming on this or just simple drawing on the phone that the ferro display replicates

[@Gwalchgwyn]

I am surprised that a sound-reactive graphic equaliser was not one of your first demos. Very cool idea and impressive result- wonderful work! :)

[@AppliedProcrastination]

We’ve had it in the plans for a while, but this felt like a good opportunity to actually do it :)

[@AppliedProcrastination]

I just noticed that this comment wasn’t on our latest video, so you might want to check that one out if you want to see music visualization!

[@humanperson8418]

Have you guys experimented with different density liquids, and using sound waves to make the ferrofluid 'dance', while also using the magnets to suspend it in place?

[@Skovjuul]

Fantastic project! Can't wait to try and work on it in 2020.

[@thoughtsofapeer]

I think it would be cool to have an info screen showing the weather, current song playing on spotify etc. EDIT: Oh, also, and I imagine this is really tough, but it would be so cool if you could have layers of glass with paint in different colours (CMYK), to display colourful things, even opensource artwork on rotation. But again, it might have to include the colours reacting to specific "wavelengths" such that it can pick up the right colour.

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Weather station would be very cool. We don’t have high enough resolution to show song titles, though. The color idea probably won’t work, unfortunately.

[@mtrdesigns7844]

Nice work guys! I work with ferrofluid as well so I understand how much work you put into this. Looks great 👍

[@Chryoss]

Eyegasmic !

[@HyperIonMake]

Dude holy crap. It looks like its a bad cgi animation, but it's real.

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Haha! Good luck to the CGI animator who wants to make ferrofluid, I guess? 😂

[@dominicmillerca]

This is totally crazy, last week, I saw a bottle of ferrofluid on Amazon, the one with a little bit of ferrofluid in a clear liquid to play around with magnets. I immediately thought of making a magnetic display with it using electromagnets and maybe Arduino or Raspberry Pi. So I order a lot of electromagnets, I'm still waiting for them. And this morning, KZbin just suggested your video (maybe because I searched for a way to make a clear liquid to host the ferrofluid a couple of days ago... the most mysterious part of the project for me). Anyway, I didn't know someone already thought about doing this, I really thought I had an original idea... again. (facepalm) So, I've decided to build it from scratch without looking at your PCP design or your code. I want to see what I can do by myself and see how my version will compare to yours. I want to congratulate you guys for the idea and the project, it looks so good! The end result is very impressive and fun to watch. When I'm done with mine, I'll come back to share the result. ❤

[@AppliedProcrastination]

That sounds awesome. Best of luck with your project :)

[@SuperMolo666]

Pong would be amazing on this display

[@tiagotiagot]

Would it be possible to make the eletromagnets double as "metal" detectors, to fine-tune to magnetic field to get exact amounts and more gradual changes?

[@derpnerpwerp]

You could make the ferrofluid come out of different spots by adding an "emitter" at different locations, although it would be a lot more complex and would change the experience. The emitters could be fed from the reservoir. A simpler change could be to add side channels outside of the view which could be used to pull in fluid from all four sides of the display. This would allow you to do a game kind of like Galaga where you have things able to both descend and ascend across the screen

[@louisrnd4065]

Just wow from France ! 😮

[@Sideshowspike]

Such a cool and amazing thing you've made. New subscriber here, brought here by MMX and Martin at Wintergatan

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Thank you! We’re stoked to have you here :)

[@Sideshowspike]

@@AppliedProcrastination I"m stoked to be here, just my type of stuff!

[@YukioShinoda]

Really interesting project. I feel something life in the movement.

[@HmmmmmLemmeThinkNo]

I hope with all this stuff going on in the world that your internship has been going okay. Regardless, this has been a wonderul journey so far, and I look forward to whatever comes next.

[@ozzlemcschnozzle7250]

How does tank width affect everything? and have to considered keeping the top row of magnets allways on for quicker fluid availability

[@FiZiX610]

Could it do a version of Pong? Snake would be cool too. Or maybe a very simple 1-button platformer.

[@cobralyoner]

this is SO cool!!!

[@johnacsyen]

Awesome, subscribed

[@voxeledphoton]

Man I'd love to make an upside down tetris with this :V

[@xSaDii]

I'm sorry, newbie question. wouldn't it be easier to make 2d rails (Like the ones on leds displays) to control all those electromagnets instead of hundreds of wires?

[@odinborson308]

Excellent

[@umrkhayam]

This is so cool!

[@Heynicetie]

Can it run Battlefield? Lol. So you're limited by having it come from the bottom...what if you could bypass that by having some of the magnets on the edge act like a bucket brigade and pass it to the top or even the sides of the frame? You could thicken the frame so that you don't even see the magnets pulling fluid to the top. I'm imagining a maze game where the maze is generated as you progress through it. Great work, fellas. Here from Wintergatan. Subscribed!

[@AppliedProcrastination]

I like the maze idea, i think it could maybe work

[@YeshuaGod22]

would a small container of ferrofluid mounted between the pickups on a guitar react to the field distortions caused by the strings vibrating?

[@fernandomartinez125]

OMG. This is soooo cool. I want one.

[@JeremyChung]

this is so cool!! the back end electronics look so complicated, is there an easier way to do this?

[@ChrisBigBad]

Is there a video where Fetch just does a bunch of animations? I'd like to marvel at it building something from start to finish.

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Hmmm. We don’t really have a video like that, but you can check out the videos we’ve posted on Twitter while developing it. Those are often longer and contain the entire animation (sometimes still with a bit of cross-camera editing though).

[@dunkdon158]

It would be very hard, but in the long distance future, if you guys could make even smaller magnets, there would be more “pixels” and the ferrofluid would not have to jump from point to point I could crawl. Also, to prevent dropping, what if magnets at the top of a blob held slightly stronger than the one below it and so on?

[@greggv8]

How about a game of "Angry Ferrofluid"? Have a tower on the right and a blob on the left. Pull back with a joystick then let go. The blob bloops across the magnets in a very crude approximation of a parabola until it either hits the tower or impacts the 'ground'. If it hits the tower, the magnets above the impact level get turned off.

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Hmm. That could possibly work, but it would be hard to detect if ferrofluid had, unintentionally, fallen off a magnet - making the tower invisible. Would probably need a visual feedback system for that (which would be nice for other purposes too)

[@DrOne-sw6oz]

GUYS RESPECT!!!!!! Amazing piece of ....Art?? :P fantastic. simple but really really coo land unique.

[@BrunoWiebelt]

coming from wintergatan this is fantastic

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Thank you!

[@Lumin3k]

Well This is Awesome !

[@guitarBoyJunior]

Amazing job, guys! This looks truly amazing :) My suggestion for a game is "Blobby Volley". It's a relatively simple but hugely fun game. Although diagonal ball trajectories could be a problem... Anyways, good luck at NASA!

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Yep, we should’ve probably mentioned that diagonal motion doesn’t work... Only up/down and right/left. Thanks!

[@theoriginalmichaelvincent]

@@AppliedProcrastination Yep, we should’ve probably mentioned that diagonal motion doesn’t work... YET! (There I corrected this for you. ^_^)

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Lol, Thanks 😂

[@logannelsen4932]

I just came across this awesome project, and I have an idea! Use the top (and maybe sides too) as a reservoir. The fluid could be brought to the top via magnets in the bezels.

[@logannelsen4932]

Second idea: create a full-panel reservoir behind the magnets that can “spill over” in desired locations.

[@doxielain2231]

Gosh, I think I'll make this. Wonder how things have developed in the last four years (this is the first video I've seen of it). How was NASA?

[@drcaiius]

fascinating! re game design, it looks like you should be able to use the outer ring of magnets as a border to redistribute the ferrofluid from the bottom, thus opening up a lot more design options.

[@НикКор-ж2н]

По идее требуется достичь наивысшего разрешения экрана..., а так же сперва весь дисплей следует заполнить чёрным ферромагнетиком, и лишь после этого возможно начинать изображать белое на чёрном. Словно старое доброе блинкерное табло.

[@unagisama5476]

Imagine playing World of Goo on there!!!!

[@realbigdaddycool438]

That's so awesome! Cheers from Germany. BTW: Space Invaders! ;D

[@unchartedgroupielove]

Pong would be awesome

[@isaac879]

I love the display! I was wondering if you have tested using PCB electromagnets (where the magnets coil is formed from the PCB tracks)?

[@AppliedProcrastination]

We haven’t tested it, but we have had some dialog with Carl Bugeja to see if we can test his PCB magnets

[@isaac879]

@@AppliedProcrastination I've subscribed and would love to see if you get any useful results!

[@OliverSchmelzenburg]

super cool!

[@BlameItOnGreg]

The game Gish would be iconic!

[@jeffersonsilveira1452]

Have you tried multiplexing the magnets? I thought if you could do that, it would reduce the pcb size a lot. The magnets act like low pass filters so I think it is possible

[@AppliedProcrastination]

We loose too much duty cycle by multiplexing, unfortunately. But it’s a valid suggestion

[@honsonabader]

how this amazing video has so little likes and views????

[@irpyc]

Really beautiful! With some lighting integrated it could be even more amazing. Maybe some background lighting? EL (electroluminescent) panel could work great, since they are really flat and would have about enough light for use in not so bright room. From the side, a nice continues light stripe could provide neat reflection. Like some "COB LED Stripes" (the continus one where you don't see each light dot) Preferably Warm light. And good CRI (90) would worth the expense for such great object you just made.

[@irpyc]

For background lighting you could alternatively try to use the rear glass as light panel guide. For this you could just try to put the same cob led strip directly on to the edge. Then it would need some structure on/in the glass to catch the light. But it can be tricky to get homogenous light, especially near the edges/LED where it would be brighter. Gaffer/duck tape can do the trick for trying it out (with the fabric structure you can press it down more or less on the glass to achieve different brightness), a more proper solution could be to sand blast the glass.

[@ozonesama]

I know it's kind of unrealistic, but I imagine playing a "watered down" (ah!) version of the game "World of Goo" on it. Also, Martin is right, you have a great channel name. 😎

[@framma]

Really cool projects!! Are you guys electrical eng. students??

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Thanks! Yes, we are

[@framma]

@@AppliedProcrastination I'm a comp science student but I'm thinking of doing a minor in electrical engineering, you guys are an inspiration 👍

[@TouchWorld3G]

You are right, i really just want this to be a clock :D hopefully a lot cheaper. Do you know what the material cost of the first version are?

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Roughly $1500

[@YeshuaGod22]

maybe you could stick an array of nozzles along the base to quickly squirt ferrofluid upwards

[@Sty1a]

PONG would be perfect as a game :D

[@davidprock904]

Instead is setting up the electro magnetics in a square grid, put them in a honeycomb/ hexagon pattern. ALSO! will the ferro fluid flow up a capillary tube? If so you could always have some available to appear from the top!

[@AppliedProcrastination]

We tried a hexagon pattern, but it made the movement algorithm a lot more complex, so we decided against it for the full size display.

[@davidprock904]

@@AppliedProcrastination what about the other half of my idea, using a capillary tube for each column of electro magnet, have an overhead magnet to pull it out of the tube, and then unpower it to let what you pulled out the tube to fall

[@AppliedProcrastination]

It’s a bit too complicated for us to realize it in practice. Not sure if it would work, but I’m fairly sure that WE wouldn’t be able to make something like that with our resources and knowledge.

[@davidprock904]

@@AppliedProcrastination so take a different approach, have a small pipe like fish tank tubing, just something shaped similar to a candy cane, for each column of magnets, keep it in the back, and have it curve over the top and slightly downwards. Have permanent magnets always keep Ferrofluid in the vertical and slightly covering the top of the candy cane, and an electro magnet on the downwards slope/end. When you unpower the electro magnet, sure some of it will pull back to the natural magnets, but gravity will also pull some out the tip of the curved end! Let me know if you like this idea!

[@meeduoh]

Real-life flubber is finally happening

[@jessemoody2218]

Awesome job, guys! I too am NASA bound soon (not Ames though)!

[@AppliedProcrastination]

Congratulations!