July 25, 2026
Spin class for TV nerds
Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can build yourself
Tiny homemade TV has commenters dreaming of truck-sized chaos
TLDR: Scanwheel is a tiny homemade television you can build yourself using a spinning drum and lights, and people are wildly charmed by it. Commenters praised the retro weirdness, complained about the broken video link, and immediately started demanding giant versions for hubcaps, trucks, and even whole streets.
A tiny do-it-yourself television with five postage-stamp-sized screens has somehow managed to charm the internet, and the reactions are split between pure awe and delightfully unhinged ambition. The project, called Scanwheel, is basically a build-it-yourself throwback TV: a spinning drum, a handful of lights, a small Raspberry Pi computer, and a lot of patience. On paper, it sounds like a niche hobby build. In the comments, though, it turned into a full-blown fan club for weird little machines.
The loudest reaction was simple: people are obsessed. “Absolutely fantastic!” and “genuinely amazing” set the tone, with commenters calling it “stunning” and “inspiring.” But because no internet celebration is complete without at least one tiny crisis, multiple people quickly pointed out that the video link appeared broken, sending users to docs instead of the glorious spinning-TV footage everyone wanted. So yes, even this wholesome maker moment got a dash of micro-drama: rave reviews, followed by "uh, your link is busted."
Then came the truly fun part: the community immediately tried to scale this adorable gadget into something absurd. One person predicted hubcaps displaying moving images. Another demanded it be blown up to truck-bed size, then escalated further to city-street width like some kind of retro-futurist carnival billboard. That’s the mood in a nutshell: part admiration, part mad science, and part “what if we made this ridiculously bigger for no reason except vibes?”
Key Points
- •Scanwheel is a DIY drum-style mechanical television with five side-by-side windows, each 9mm by 8mm, sharing one scanning drum and using separate LEDs.
- •The display uses 20 scan lines, but the article says image quality is improved by using the Raspberry Pi Pico's PIO hardware for high horizontal resolution.
- •Required hardware includes a Symbol Technologies 21-02485 stepper motor, an A4988-based StepStick driver, a 100uF capacitor, a Raspberry Pi Pico or Pico W, LEDs, and matched current-limiting resistors.
- •The project includes 3D-print files for a base, drum, and lid, with specific recommendations on scaling, print quality, Orca Slicer settings, and optional drum customization via OpenSCAD.
- •The software runs on MicroPython 1.28, with device-side and PC-side tools for driving the display, streaming video over a network, and converting images into the raw framebuffer format.