Flappy is a mechanical letterboard, built by hand and driven by circuitry we designed ourselves. Connect it to whatever you want: a flight tracker, a stock ticker, or just send announcements to your housemates.
Every character lives in its own module and flips over — mechanically, audibly, satisfyingly — whenever the message changes. We build each unit by hand in California, running every flap through its paces before it leaves the workbench.
Need more than 10 characters? Units mount side-by-side or stack vertically, so you can build up.
Some of us call it Maxi. Room for a sentence, a flight number, or your housemate's full government name when they've really earned it.
Every Flappy has a single microcontroller to act as the brains of the display, handling the WiFi connection and controlling each one-character module. Each module has a custom PCB for driving the motor and receiving hall sensor inputs.
Custom-designed to drive each flap precisely.
Modify the open source firmware or just connect your own microcontroller.
Painstakingly assembled by the hands of bored burnt out bay area techies.
The microcontroller is a Raspberry Pi Pico 2W. The firmware is written entirely in Rust with the Embassy framework. An MQTT server sends messages to the microcontroller over WiFi. The microcontroller then communicates with each custom PCB over a serial connection. The custom PCBs are a series of daisy chained shift registers, which is simpler and faster than the more traditional SPI or I2C approach.
None of that is required reading. It's just here for anyone who wants to know what's actually inside the thing.
Burnt Out Bakery is focused on making hackable hardware, so the entire project is made open source and open hardware, and replacement parts can be ordered or printed easily.
Ours is on the kitchen wall. Here's what a couple of Flappys are actually saying right now.
Wired to a flight tracker, on a Flappy Mini — flips every time something passes overhead.
Let your household know about freshly baked goods.
Make it say whatever you want, let your creativity drive!
We're Burnt Out Bakery — not actually a bakery, though we did briefly consider selling both. We're two Californians who like circuitry the way other people like a good crust: obsessively, and slightly too seriously.
Flappy started on our own kitchen counter and turned into something we wanted other people to have too. Every unit that ships was built, tested, and probably named after a pizza topping by one of us personally.
Chestnut — Head of Quality Control, self-appointed. She hasn't signed off on a single unit yet, but she supervises every build from under the desk.
We list as many units on Etsy as our small home workshop can currently keep up with, and are open to custom orders too. If the Etsy item is out of stock, join the waitlist.
We're working on a version of Flappy that's friendly for builders of all ages to put together themselves. No firm date yet — subscribe and we'll email you the moment it's real.