Meet the Flapulator, the “form over function” calculator. No more do you have to sit in silence as you calculate. Sit back and enjoy the clacks of a mechanical keyboard, as your display gently clicks its way to the next digit. Questionable accuracy, slow calculation speed, but maximum tactile pleasure.

This was a small passion project which I've been working on for a few evenings and weekends over the last month. I found out one of my favourite Mathematicians/Comedians/YouTube-maths-community-personalities: Matt Parker was going to be doing a show in my hometown, and he is known for his signing of calculators. Upon discovering this at the start of March I then had four weeks to design and build a novel calculator which offered something no calculator has done before, and thus the Flapulator was born.

The concept was to create the most over-engineered calculator which had an analogue feel, but still with a digital brain. After exploring some ideas with flip dots, I eventually settled on split flaps as my display choice. The clack of big wheels of characters turning in airports has always been a sensory pleasure of mine, so I wondered how tough it would be to build a vastly smaller, but fully functional 3D printed version from scratch. Turns out it was fun and also quite a challenge!

...read more at makerworld.com