[its_ethan]

I was curious roughly how long 150 million operations is...

Assuming (literally just a guess) that the tiles "operate" at a rate of 3 times per second playing back a video or something:

(150 million operation) / (3 operations/ second) = 50 million seconds = 578 days

It's likely much slower than 3 operations per second too - so probably 6-10x that in reality, which would be on the order of a decade of continuous runtime before they reach expected EOL.

[mmcclure]

> Keeping low numer of controllers on one data line, allows to drive these displays with an increadible speed of 15 frames per second (black – to – white).

From Alfazeta's page (including the typos). 15 frames per second feels pretty wild, but would also, unfortunately, change this math pretty considerably if you ran it full tilt.

[its_ethan]

I had originally assumed 15 fps but it did feel a bit too fast.. BUT a 15 fps video being displayed in black and white doesn't mean the tiles will "flip" 15 times per second - a 15fps video could still mean that a tile doesn't flip at all for 50 "frames".

It does leave you exposed to the risk of a video where one of these does flip like 12 times in a second for like 20 seconds or something.

You could probably analyze whatever video is being played to calculate some kind of like "risk" value or "expected-lifetime-decrease" value to at least better understand what the impact is of the video being played. All that goes out the window when you do the sort of real-time mirroring shown in the article.