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LED signs for buildings


bc6

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Being from NYC and having visited Times Square more times than I care to remember. I automatically think of Japan and thought a LED sign would be a nice little project to keep me busy. The kicker is that Id like the signs to be in Japanese (hence my posting on JNS lol). So I guess I need to do some prototype research on the kind of sign that I want to model. Second find a source for leds that are programmable in Japanese and a battery source.

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Finding the Japanese sign might be the easy part. I'm assuming you are talking about the old flip-dot or LED panel display type sign used for alpha-numeric displays, and not a prefab sign that is illuminated from behind by LED's.

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Finding the Japanese sign might be the easy part. I'm assuming you are talking about the old flip-dot or LED panel display type sign used for alpha-numeric displays, and not a prefab sign that is illuminated from behind by LED's.

 

Yup Im talking about the alpha-numeric displays.

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Ooh, I have a link to a place that might have something like that, but they sell things that if word got out, I'd never be able to get stuff from them again cause I'd flood the dude with too many sales.  :laugh:

EDIT: And cr@p, I lost the link. It's an outfit locally I see at the Great Train show when the JRM has it's display. I knew I lost a bunch of links when my external hard drive crashed (power outage inwhich my UPS failed to kickin) during the transfer last week.  :BangHead:

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At the Great Train Show, they sell belt buckets that use this matrix (or one identical to it) They sell for like 15 bucks each, 20 for green or white for some odd reason.

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Darren Jeffries

The kit there looks hugely complicated to construct. I did see somewhere that someone had used miniture LCD displays for his layout. It looked very impressive, he had a series of Japanese product commercials running on it, but there is no reason why you couldn't play what you want. Sorta the technology they use in digital photoframes or PSP's

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I did see somewhere that someone had used miniture LCD displays for his layout. It looked very impressive, he had a series of Japanese product commercials running on it, but there is no reason why you couldn't play what you want.

 

Wasn't that on the Enoshima Layout?

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The kit there looks hugely complicated to construct. I did see somewhere that someone had used miniture LCD displays for his layout. It looked very impressive, he had a series of Japanese product commercials running on it, but there is no reason why you couldn't play what you want. Sorta the technology they use in digital photoframes or PSP's

 

You can bag one of those mini oLED screens for next to nothing now. I'm sure it wouldn't be much to buy a mini TFT one from a keychain photo frame they sell for 20 bucks and do something with it.

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Darren Jeffries

The kit there looks hugely complicated to construct. I did see somewhere that someone had used miniture LCD displays for his layout. It looked very impressive, he had a series of Japanese product commercials running on it, but there is no reason why you couldn't play what you want. Sorta the technology they use in digital photoframes or PSP's

 

You can bag one of those mini oLED screens for next to nothing now. I'm sure it wouldn't be much to buy a mini TFT one from a keychain photo frame they sell for 20 bucks and do something with it.

 

Or Car boot sales (Yard sales in the US)... Computer modders use them to jazz up their pc cases. i am sure you can pick up defunct PSP's or Gameboy Colours for next to nothing.

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Martijn Meerts

the problem with those screens is usually how to hook them up. If you take a screen out of a busted PSP, it's not like you can just hook it up to a computer and play video's or something =)

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bc6 - I don't know if this is what you might want to look into, (also being a New Yawker and working near TSq) this is a company located on Long Island, that sells neon signs and LEDs but the problem is they are be in English.

Here is their website but if interested also look under the Neon-like signs.

 

http://www.miniatronics.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=N

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bc6 - I don't know if this is what you might want to look into, (also being a New Yawker and working near TSq) this is a company located on Long Island, that sells neon signs and LEDs but the problem is they are be in English.

Here is their website but if interested also look under the Neon-like signs.

 

http://www.miniatronics.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=N

 

I like the one called Pork Storage.

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[quote author=Shashinka Ichiban link=topic=1191.msg10399#msg10399 date=1245368985

 

I like the one called Pork Storage.

 

Yeah, that's right at home in Times Square at the Carnegie Deli! :snorting:

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about 4 years back i got one of those little personal video recorders [pvr] that work from a flash card with a 4" screen and mounted it in a tomix high rise on the jrm layout. it played some commercials, movie trailers, and such. doug saw it in our photos and wanted one so i was able to bag him one cheap and traded him for a 700 addon set i was having trouble getting. he used it on setagaya and it lasted i think 2 shows and died [turns out these pvrs were early ones in the development and had high failure rates, my original one blew after a year or so, but i had a backup that is still working]. doug then went to a psp to pllay the video on his highrise.

 

since then there are gobs o cheap little music/video players now days for less than $40 that you could pop into a building to play some videos on.

 

i also have grabbed a couple of those keychain photo players for less than $10 to try and do some smaller electronic billboards.

 

also experimented with one of those little led buttons that you can have text scrolling accross. unfortunately the ones you get in the states are roman characters only! they are also pretty big compared to led boards you see in real life when you scale them out.

 

cool thing is that this stuff will just get cheaper and more prevalent to play with! just saw that the 2009 electronics part award went to a push button switch that has a tiny oled display and display circuitry built into it. so you can change the picture on the buttons!

 

way cool!

 

cheers

 

jeff

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about 4 years back i got one of those little personal video recorders [pvr] that work from a flash card with a 4" screen and mounted it in a tomix high rise on the jrm layout. it played some commercials, movie trailers, and such. doug saw it in our photos and wanted one so i was able to bag him one cheap and traded him for a 700 addon set i was having trouble getting. he used it on setagaya and it lasted i think 2 shows and died [turns out these pvrs were early ones in the development and had high failure rates, my original one blew after a year or so, but i had a backup that is still working]. doug then went to a psp to pllay the video on his highrise.

 

since then there are gobs o cheap little music/video players now days for less than $40 that you could pop into a building to play some videos on.

 

i also have grabbed a couple of those keychain photo players for less than $10 to try and do some smaller electronic billboards.

 

also experimented with one of those little led buttons that you can have text scrolling accross. unfortunately the ones you get in the states are roman characters only! they are also pretty big compared to led boards you see in real life when you scale them out.

 

cool thing is that this stuff will just get cheaper and more prevalent to play with! just saw that the 2009 electronics part award went to a push button switch that has a tiny oled display and display circuitry built into it. so you can change the picture on the buttons!

 

way cool!

 

cheers

 

jeff

 

See, you can use the internet in Chicago. Now all you have to do Jeff is take the Capital Limited (P030) back to DC.

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the plan was to take it out to chicago, but then plans changed and went to milwaukee first so i ended up flying instead. but did take the train from milwaukee to chicago and been riding trains around chicago when i can!

 

btw milwaukee is a very sweet little city and the calatrava designed milwaukee museum of art is something to be seen. one of the most stunning buildings in the us! was wondering if i would ever get to see it. well worth the visit.

 

hotel wifi is spotty. forgot to bring a cat5 to plug in and too lazy to see if they have one spare.

 

cheers

 

jeff

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You can bag one of those mini oLED screens for next to nothing now. I'm sure it wouldn't be much to buy a mini TFT one from a keychain photo frame they sell for 20 bucks and do something with it.

 

The problem there is, how do you program it?

 

Having OLED billboards and working scale train departure displays would rock.

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Martijn Meerts

a departure display would be tricky, you'll likely need a computer controlled layout to really be able to do that. Although, I can imagine with railcom it would be doable using lots of electronics and such.

 

I really need to learn some more about electronics and PIC programming and such, lots of cool things can be made with a cheap little circuit.

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CaptOblivious

What would you use to get a display that small? Departure displays aren't very big in N…

 

But even without layout automation, the signs would really be too small to read; any sort of animation on the sign would look great from a distance.

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What would you use to get a display that small? Departure displays aren't very big in N…

 

If it's wall-mounted, just cover up the parts of the screen you don't need.

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CaptOblivious

What would you use to get a display that small? Departure displays aren't very big in N…

 

If it's wall-mounted, just cover up the parts of the screen you don't need.

 

Ah, I was thinking about the ones that hang from the roof

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