a light at the bottom of the sea
28 HP
A blank panel with an e-paper window onto the deep sea floor, where a whale has come to rest. Each time the rack comes on, a month passes down there, drawn in black and yellow and kept with the power off.
Switch on and a month passes on the sea floor, drawn over about twenty seconds. Switch off and the picture stays.
This browser's own WHALE FALL, its world grown and drawn by the module's own code, dot for dot what the module shows, at the screen's own pace. The module also wants the rack off for three minutes before the next month; the page doesn't.
Switched on, WHALE FALL wakes, moves its world on a month and draws it. For about twenty seconds the screen flashes its inks over the last picture, then the new one comes up, and it goes back to sleep until the rack is next switched on.
E-paper needs no power to hold a picture. Switched off, WHALE FALL keeps the last one it drew, for days, so the rack always shows the picture from the last time it was played. Its world is kept with it, and grows on from there.
A few kilometres down, a whale has come to rest on the mud. Scavengers find it within days and strip it over a year or two, until the ribs show and then only bone is left.
The bones feed the deep for decades: bacteria in their oil, white mats over them, mussels and clams round them, and worms with red plumes boring into them. When the oil is gone, sponges and corals settle on what's left, and the bones crumble back into the mud, the skull last. Now and then another whale comes down somewhere else on the floor, and it all begins again beside the old one.
Every WHALE FALL grows its own from the moment it's first switched on. Nothing is repeated, and no two are the same. The page's WHALE FALL is this browser's own.
The screen's glass sits behind the window in a printed black frame, pressed against a thin foam ring so its picture lands exactly on the window, with ribs behind it so a press can't push it in. Its ribbon folds back round the glass's bottom edge, under it, into a connector on the board 4 mm behind the panel. The board is screwed to four spacers soldered to the panel's back, one at each corner. Under the glass, an RP2350 moves the world on a month, draws it and sends it to the glass, then sleeps.
Drag it or use the arrow keys to turn it; click it to take it apart.