Coming off of a Flux Capacitor build I wanted to bring the Time Circuits to life. And I know a lot of people have done amazing versions with Arduino and 7-segment LED characters. But what I'm looking to do is something a bit more analog. I read that for the film the Time Circuits had a simple back-lit solution for the NOV and OCT characters because there were not solutions to do this as actual 7-digit LED characters. This got me to thinking. Could I do the entire thing with backlit characters? I recently bought a Cricut so I thought simply cutting the characters out of black vinyl and use a red plastic filter would give me the look. But one thing bothered me:
If you look closely at a 7-segment LED character, you see the illuminated segments, but you also see the UN-ILLUMINATED segments slightly. I wanted this depth. So, what I've landed on is a three layer approach:
1) Red filter sheet (and green and yellow for the other two)
2) The "Lit" segments cut out of a limo-dark window tint
3) All segments cut out of a black (opaque) vinyl
When I line all three of these up over a lightbox it looks really convincing.
I have the face plates being cut and bent at sendcutsend. From there I'll put all this together.
more to come ...
If you look closely at a 7-segment LED character, you see the illuminated segments, but you also see the UN-ILLUMINATED segments slightly. I wanted this depth. So, what I've landed on is a three layer approach:
1) Red filter sheet (and green and yellow for the other two)
2) The "Lit" segments cut out of a limo-dark window tint
3) All segments cut out of a black (opaque) vinyl
When I line all three of these up over a lightbox it looks really convincing.
I have the face plates being cut and bent at sendcutsend. From there I'll put all this together.
more to come ...
