Uploaded November 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
A dancing/exercising robot created with a vintage toy by Tomy called Lights Alive. The toy doesn't have any animation features. I just did a simple stop-motion with it by taking pictures of the screen.
Here’s an unnecessarily long explanation of the toy... because I’m me:
Lights Alive is a drawing toy which allows for the creation of illuminated pixel art, similar to the more-popular “Lite Brite” toy.
It contains a small incandescent backlight situated behind a rotatable color filter and a 31 x 23 array of little holes (or “cells”), each stuffed with a transparent ball and a tiny window shutter.
When a shutter is closed (its default state), it blocks the light from shining through its cell. By gently pressing a ball down deeper into its cell, the ball becomes wedged in a position which forces open the shutter, thus allowing light to shine through that particular cell.
To push the balls down, a set of tools is included: Four simple-shape stamps, and two straight line tools (one for orthogonals, one for diagonals) akin to spiky pizza cutters. On the butts of the handles of the straight line tools are little pokers, which allow for the easy poking of individual cells.
Unfortunately, there is no way to pull an individual ball back up, and seal off the light again for that cell, besides resetting the whole screen*. The reset is done by pushing the screen away from you, running it along a tined roller underneath it that pushes the balls back up.
Another feature is a little wheel at the bottom edge of the toy which can rotate a multi-colored filter in front of the backlight. It really makes the lights alive!
*You can actually erase the screen row by row from the top if you perform the reset slowly enough. Because of this, the best technique for drawing is to start at the bottom, and draw upwards row by row. If you make a mistake, you’ll only have to clear enough rows to undo the error, not the whole image.
#stopmotion #robot #lightsalive
A dancing/exercising robot created with a vintage toy by Tomy called Lights Alive. The toy doesn't have any animation features. I just did a simple stop-motion with it by taking pictures of the screen.
Here’s an unnecessarily long explanation of the toy... because I’m me:
Lights Alive is a drawing toy which allows for the creation of illuminated pixel art, similar to the more-popular “Lite Brite” toy.
It contains a small incandescent backlight situated behind a rotatable color filter and a 31 x 23 array of little holes (or “cells”), each stuffed with a transparent ball and a tiny window shutter.
When a shutter is closed (its default state), it blocks the light from shining through its cell. By gently pressing a ball down deeper into its cell, the ball becomes wedged in a position which forces open the shutter, thus allowing light to shine through that particular cell.
To push the balls down, a set of tools is included: Four simple-shape stamps, and two straight line tools (one for orthogonals, one for diagonals) akin to spiky pizza cutters. On the butts of the handles of the straight line tools are little pokers, which allow for the easy poking of individual cells.
Unfortunately, there is no way to pull an individual ball back up, and seal off the light again for that cell, besides resetting the whole screen*. The reset is done by pushing the screen away from you, running it along a tined roller underneath it that pushes the balls back up.
Another feature is a little wheel at the bottom edge of the toy which can rotate a multi-colored filter in front of the backlight. It really makes the lights alive!
*You can actually erase the screen row by row from the top if you perform the reset slowly enough. Because of this, the best technique for drawing is to start at the bottom, and draw upwards row by row. If you make a mistake, you’ll only have to clear enough rows to undo the error, not the whole image.
#stopmotion #robot #lightsalive
