Penne for your thoughts: This pasta display can show three individual frames and it’s trying its best, okay

If I had all the money in the world, I think I’d retire to a shed somewhere in the countryside and spend the rest of my life making bizarre projects. I’d have to work damn hard to come up with anything odder than this pasta display, however, nor would I possess the will to keep going after an early penne-based disaster.

YouTube channel Julius Makes has shown the world what it didn’t know it needed, a step-by-step breakdown of the build process for a pasta-based display (via Hackaday). After noticing that penne pasta ridges essentially look the same as gears when turned on their side, an early effort involved linking multiple pasta pieces together with a spring-loaded mechanism in the hope they would rotate in sequence when motorised.

Spoiler: They didn’t. Even once the ends had been trimmed, it wasn’t possible to reliably spin them in sequence to show an image on one side, and an image on the other.

Undeterred, Julius Makes pivoted to cannelloni, the obvious next choice in any pasta-based project. While the larger tubes don’t interlink by virtue of the fact they’re smooth, an entire motorised base was constructed to both hold the pasta aloft and link its movements via a sequence of gears underneath.

It’s worth noting the sheer amount of effort that’s been put into the design. Each cannelloni tube is held by a framework that looks more like a miniature car chassis, which succeeds in both gripping the pasta firmly and keeping weight to a minimum.

A button on the front of the stand alternates between three different pasta positions, meaning that three images could be engraved on thirds of the cannelloni tubes. Yep, engraved.

Well, for a test run, anyway. Julius Makes was less than thrilled with the results, so eventually resorted to stencils and spray paint.

That means the eventual images have a, err, rustic, charm to them, although props for the use of what looks like glitter. This adds a holiday flair to the eventual image, and if there’s one thing that makes me think of the holidays, it’s cannelloni.

An exercise in patience, persistence, and pasta, then. While this particular creator project can’t technically display more than three images without tube replacement, I still think three spray-painted frames of Doom could potentially be rendered, and if the motor was upgraded we could perhaps even see three entire Hz from this pasta-based display.

A project for another day, though. It’s unlikely to make it in our best gaming monitors guide yet, but who knows what Julius Makes might come up with next. Time will tagliatelle. I’m so, so sorry.