
A Display Powered by Air: 3D Printed Microfluidic Multiplexing
Can you build a display powered by air? After building a ring oscillator that runs on air pressure instead of electricity, I wanted to see if I could push microfluidic logic even further. In this video, I design and 3D print a multiplexed 4x4 dot-matrix display that runs on air (or more precisely the pressure difference between atmosphere and vacuum). By combining vacuum transistors into AND gates and integrating them directly into the 3D-printed structure, I managed to control 16 pixels using only 8 control lines. From a single manual pixel to a full matrix that can display numbers, letters and almost play snake, this is another journey into the complex world of air-powered computing and air powered soft robots. Timestamps: 0:00 – Circuits running on Air? 1:00 – Building the First Pixel 1:46 – The Scaling Problem (Multiplexing) 3:16 – How a Vacuum Transistor Works 4:11 – Designing an Integrated AND Gate 6:31 – Growing: The 2x2 Matrix 10:36 – Building the 4x4 Display 12:50 – It’s Alive! References: [1] Jensen, E. C., Grover, W. H., & Mathies, R. A. (2007). Micropneumatic Digital Logic Structures for Integrated Microdevice Computation and Control. Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, 16(6), 1378–1385. https://doi.org/10.1109/jmems.2007.906080 [2] Bol, R. J. M., & Šavija, B. (2023). Micromechanical Models for FDM 3D-Printed Polymers: A Review. Polymers, 15(23), 4497. https://doi.org/10.3390/polym15234497 Image Credits: "Tiny dot-matrix LED display made by Hewlett Packard" by LHF. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tiny_Dot-matrix_LED_Display_by_HP.jpg "A ray of light being refracted in a plastic block" by ajizai. Public Domain. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Refraction_photo.png "Mechanism of diffuse reflection by a solid surface" by GianniG46. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diffuse_refl.gif



![The World's BEST Shoelace Knot! ...[The Berluti Knot]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ds-EtA4Uw6s/mqdefault.jpg)





![ChatGPT is made from 100 million of these [The Perceptron]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/l-9ALe3U-Fg/mqdefault.jpg)





























