The hardest part here had to be the frame and the cabling, and it shows how much care went in. Several 3D-printed attempts failed before a working black frame came out, and fitting the fragile ribbon cables to each screen was described as a nightmare. Getting ten thin transparent panels lined up and wired without breaking anything is the kind of task that would stop most people, so seeing a finished handheld unit is satisfying.
The build itself is tidy. A custom board called TENEX V1, laid out in KiCad, carries an Adafruit Feather M4 and an MPU6050 for motion-based interaction, all running on 12 volts and programmed in the Arduino IDE. Solder paste went on through a metal stencil, parts were placed with tweezers and reflowed in a modified toaster oven, and the green PCB sits at the base under a stack of ten 128x56 transparent OLEDs from CrystalFontz, each with its own built-in polarizer and its own chip select line on SPI. The orange ribbon cable linking screen stack to board, plus the small silver screws holding it together, give it a proper product feel.
Depth comes from illuminating different layers of the transparent screens, and the demos make good use of it: rotating triangles, squares and circles, a stylized SH logo, and a particle simulation with blue points bouncing in 3D.
One trade-off stands out: those built-in polarizers block a lot of light, so brightness suffers. The maker calls it a proof of concept that can be scaled and thinks it can still be improved, which seems fair to me.
Project by SeanHodgins. Watch it on their YouTube channel: