It's been a while...
Quite some progress has been made on the programming - but this takes time, and the single steps can not easily be captured.
My pod bay HAL is supposed to display the iconic computer screens from the movie, the static ones and the animated ones. There are basically two ways how this could be achieved: either by playing movie files, or by rendering them in real-time.
Such video files already exist in fantastic quality, published by
"the HAL project" on youtube. These videos have exceptional quality, and they are incredibly close to the movie and just recently they have been updated to 4k quality. The HAL project also provides
a playlist with videos of all individual screens. These could be used to play them in random order (which I find necessary to keep my prop unpredictable). The only technical problem might be that the Raspberry Pi may have trouble to play the videos without noticeable transitions.
On the other hand, I really like to customize things. My pod bay HAL (like all my other SciFi computers) will get a tea timer. It will also feature an alarm clock and connect to my Google calendar to display upcoming events. And at some point, I may use the camera for face recognition. And I want to display the output for all of these things as additional HAL-inspired screens. Therefore, I decided to go the second path, writing computer code to render the screens from scratch, and in real time.
The inspiration for this came from user
Zapwizard and his
Pipboy project. He uses the pygame module for python to produce beautiful graphics and animations with plenty of functions (like internet radio - which, at some point, could also become a nice add-on for my HAL).
With this in mind, I started my pygame-based python code which I call "hal9000lib".
I started with a first attempt which displayed the static three-letter screens. Then I thought of Karl Tate's beautiful work: If my code can display the screens once, it could also display them multiple times. This way, one could use a larger computer monitor to display the six or eight screens of the larger HAL consoles - eventually this could be used for a multi-monitor setup, like Karl's.
While I am currently restructuring my code for this to become possible, I want to share here a first image with one of the iconic three-letter screens.
It looks a little better in real life, where the black background of the screen blends better into the black color of the case.