The answer's in the shed, now what's the question?

I started this project by a happy coincidence: I was looking though my store of *stuff* and found several boxes of flipdots that I scored when I was working next to a highway sign maintenance company; and I read on Hackaday that they had a contest involving retro technology.

So I pulled out one box of flipdots. Unopened since 2015.

In here were 5 flipdot panels, each 5 x 7 pixels. Here's a photo of 4 of them arranged so as to give an idea of the final clock. The ruler is 600mm. Please ignore the photobomb from my Hoke's Long Weight, the object that many apprentices have been sent to ask for but somehow is never in stock...

As you can see many of the disks have become loose, due to the plastic carriers getting broken, they really are very delicate.  Tonight's job is to get one panel in good order so that I can document how it works and how it is connected.