This is cool. I wonder, as you were iterating on the design and development, why didn't you start with a very small grid (10x10) to validate or test different options for their practicality and operation before scaling up to the 1000 pixel versions? It might have saved a lot of time and money, but maybe small scale tests aren't sufficient to work out the kinks?
Definitely! I scaled up to 3×21 to validate some things and immediately broke a lot of what I thought would work.
I tested a 1×10 grid of the wooden pixels to try out some different variations as well.