How fast do they need to switch from one position to the other?[\QUOTE]
mmm, I don't know, < 1 sec
I don't have one, but I was thinking in some mechanism that each one of this retracting parts costs as most 1 dollar... I'm not sure if I'm dreaming here, but that's what I was looking for
Does it matter how loud it is, that is, can it be as clicky as a pen?
Yes, it can be as clicky as a pen
How about this doodad?
**broken link removed**
Thank you, but the price is prohibitive!
I will tell you what I need this for, I have no reasons to keep it secret. I thought it could be cool to make an Electromechanical Go Board ("Go" is a chess like chinese game
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28board_game%29 ). Instead of placing stones I think that the board could have some kind of rotating tri-side piece, with each side with a different state (space/white stone/black stone) printed or something like that. It's nice to play Go in real boards instead of computer display, but to count spaces and stones is boring and you can make mistakes... So I thought that with an electromechanical go board, you could have a microcontroller do all that stuffs and automatically spin the tri-sided piece if it happens that that space has been conquered.I want the pen mechanism to spin this tri-side pieces: when a player want to put a white stone in some space, it spin manually this piece. When the black player eats this stone, the microcontorller automatically spins it back to the normal state. Plus, watching the rivals stones disappears with a pen-like click could be great!
The thing is that Go board has almost 400 spaces (19x19)!!!! Thats a lot of tri-sided pieces!... Neveless, you can play Go in a 9x9 board (81 spaces) ... so thats why i want it to be very cheap, and simple and small (you must pack together 81 pieces).
There are some electronics boards that uses LEDs, but I'm not interested in that solution... this is simple an idea I had some years ago, and I just remembered today.
Thank you
Thanks again