We love electromagnetic displays: take the modern look of a digital readout, combine with the low-tech coil mechanism that you theoretically could create yourself, add a dash of random clacking sounds, and what’s not to like? Evidently, [Nicolas Kruse] shares our affection for these displays, because he’s taken it beyond theory and created a 7-segment magnetically-actuated display from scratch.

The display is 3D-printed, as you would expect these days. Each segment contains a small neodymium magnet, and each coil a 1 mm iron core for flux concentration. The coils are driven with a 1.6 A peak current, causing the segments to flip in less than 10 ms. [Nicolas] provides STL files for the display base, segments, and spools so you can print your own display. He’s also released the schematics and code for the driver, which uses an ATtiny44 to drive the coils through N- and P-channel MOSFETs. Initially designed to drive a passive 4×7 matrix of displays, the driver couldn’t quite manage to flip one segment without affecting its neighbors. However, for a single display, the driver works fine. We hope he figures out the matrix issue soon, because we really want to see a clock made with these displays.

You can see (and hear) a short video of the display in action after the break. The clacking does not disappoint!

We’ve featured projects using commercial flip displays on these pages before, as well as those using recycled flip-dot matrixes.