These are strange and difficult times. Thanks to COVID-19 we at LiveCode Ltd. are all now working from home, and staying together as a company via Zoom and Slack.

I’m sure many of you are in the same boat, quarantined or semi-quarantined, and trying to keep going without the usual levels of face to face support and company. We’ve been talking about how we can all support each other during this time. We have come up with two options.

It’s true for many of us that we have extra time on our hands at the moment. That extra time presents the opportunity to start or finish those tasks you’ve always been meaning to do. For me that could have been finally getting round to painting the garden fence five years after it was put up (unpainted), clearing out the garage, or sorting out my junk room – I mean spare room! I can confirm that after what has been about a month of me being at home I have not started any of those jobs. I have however tried to build a mini-golf course in my back garden and, which you may be more interested in hearing about, got stuck into some coding challenges.

Bud Nail recently got in touch to tell us about his environmentally friendly digital display project in LiveCode, a fascinating project that Bud is trying to raise funds for on KickStarter. He has kindly agreed to do a guest blog post to tell us all about the project…

First, just a little bit of background on FlipBit. You can go deeper by visiting our KickStarter page. Recently, I was looking for a project that would keep my intern, Alex, interested as he learns to use design and fabrication tools. I had been mentally designing what might be called a mechanical pixel for many years. Typically, it would come to mind when on a long boring drive with nothing much to look at but trees and roadside signs. I had mentally tested and rejected many approaches for cost and complexity reasons, but at some point I finally focused in on what I thought was probably an optimum design. Alex became my inspiration to finally get the design out of the gray matter and into something tangible.