Flip Fluid on Flip Dots

The project mounts a FLIP (Fluid Implicit Particle) fluid simulation onto vintage flipdot electromechanical panels as an installation for EMF2026. Flipdots are non‑volatile magnetic disks driven by polarised cores, and usable panels are rare and expensive; a cache of old Hanover panels was obtained and examined. The panels the creator worked with are 13×28 (dots grouped in sevens), with delicate construction and a bulky rear PCB that prevents seamless tiling. The goal was a fast, visually coherent simulation with the audible swish of mechanical dots, but the stock drive circuitry is very slow (about one second per update) and the matrix wiring imposes further limits.

Technical challenges drove exploration of multiple drive strategies. Dots need only millisecond‑scale polarising pulses, so scanning all columns quickly could in principle update panels in ~56 ms, but each coil is ~18 Ω (≈666 mA at 12 V) so higher voltage/shorter pulses demand very high instantaneous currents and beefy drivers. Desoldering and remounting dots is fragile and laborious. Two practical routes were considered: mounting cheap motor‑driver H‑bridge chips (MX6208/BE6208/LK6208, SOIC‑8, ~0.5 A rating) directly onto panels - requiring cutting column traces - and a capacitor half‑bridge scheme that uses series capacitors and MOSFETs per dot. The H‑bridge approach needs trace modification; the capacitor approach reduces parts per H‑bridge but adds complexity, board area and risk of shoot‑through.