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Just found and bought it on ebay! thanks!

Focusing three different tiny transparencies against a translucent monitor panel from a distance and getting them to flash contiguously... That's a lot of armature to hold it all in place! And setting the focus... Wow!

That made me think it might be easier to use Flintstones' Tech and hire a couple spiders to live in the Pod and change the transparencies for you when the lights go on. You could pay them one caterpillar a week w/ a cricket as the occasional bonus!

I was reading through some led sites just now (now that's a rockin' Saturday night!) and saw the tricolor led which has an automatic timer in it to control the color. You could use three bulbs (r,g,b) on an IC chip if you wanted to bulk the situation up, but gain total control over blink rate.

That made me think that a tri-color could be good in several places just to get a regular color change as seen on Bowman's face. Hook one up to a Counter IC chip and instead of steady color change, you introduce flashing.

But if you used separate leds, you could FO each color separately and 'spell' some common HAL screens with enough strands, like COM and the dozen other main words.

If you were to glue dozens to hundreds of FO strands in a 1" square/rectangle and have each strand go off to a different color, you should be able to do some basic spelling. No single strand could share two leds, but I think you could still spell simple stuff out.

I guess you would set the 'square' of dozens to hundreds of strands in regular white glue to form a block. Then it would be a matter of combing through the strands and selecting shapes of them. You would still suffer focus issues as the FO ends in sharp points of light. Therefore, the output end would have to be some distance from the panel's back surface: as the closer it got, the more focused each FO endpoint would be.

You could use a fewer thicker and therefore less resolution, but easier to configure strands. Or you could use a far greater amount of thinner strands that will give you greater screen resolution, but be far more complex to configure. There will be a number of strands that are simply not used as the screen could be black. In these cases, those strands get cut short and painted off so no light can get in at all...

Another idea that hits me, is to make a tiny light box set to one monitor panel each, put the tri-color led and in the middle make a smaller FO Square just big enough for letters, not the whole screen. The FO leads to one white led per word which is plugged into a Ripple Counter (marquee effect). The big area of color with a changing white shape in the middle would give the most accurate light reflections on the helmet, face and walls possible! And it wouldn't be all that difficult, though certainly an effort!

If any of that makes sense, that is!

I could draw diagrams easier! I'll eventually have to for the project... I'll have to see some model parts before I can draw up the full wiring diagram (basically a flowchart). I will post it when available!

-t