Re: monitor-LED-project... (longish)

[Jan van de Wouw <jvdwouw@xxxx>]

Hello everyone,

First of all thank you for alle the responses; my mailbox filled
up with over 20 mails regarding my LED-panel this evening...

I will try to address the most frequent questions here...

Q- Will I be selling these, either complete or as a kit?
A- No; I will not. It would involve too much organisation
and very much organisation to do so.
There would also be problems with warranty, installation etc.
And I can't start to think of what it would have to cost;
the system I showed everyone is my 3rd setup, but actually
my SIXTH prototype. A lot of how it turned out is just dumb
luck, some parts come from broken appliances or were salvaged
from earlier projects which I made years ago...
I only know that making this thing has cost me over 8 times of
what the parts in it now are worth, without labour and R&D...
Actual parts-cost for THIS unit is somewhere around $20,-

Q- Would you mind if I built one myself?
A- No, not at all! Go ahead! That was the #1 reason for me to post
the pictures; to inspire people. I have never ever thought about
making profit on this; I made it for the fun of making it,
getting to know my car better, having something functional there
and (most important) customising the car to be even more "mine"
Should anyone copy this, it will reflect the abilities and ideas
of it's owner/builder, thus making it personal for that person too!

Q- You should have used Blue for the AC-icon, why not?
A- Blue isn't available in the form factor of the LEDs I used.
It would also ruin the symmetry I have now AND I'm not really
fond of the actual color of most blue LEDs. Feel free to use
any color you want on your system if you build one...

Q- How did you make those icons? Are the colors from the LEDs?
A- I work at a print- and repro-service, so I have acces to high
quality equipment and material. I designed the icons in
Adobe Illustrator, making the black so called "registration"-black;
100% of all colors (so 100% Cyan, Magenta, Yellow AND Black together)
to get an opaque finish. I printed this on a color laser printer
at work on a transparent OverHead Projection sheet .The icons are
left open in this, making them transparent. Even with the thick
layer of toner on the sheet I had to carefully glue 3 layers of
sheet on top of each other to get the icons to be the only thing lit.
The window you see is smoked plexi I had laying around, without
the backlight from the LEDs this works like a tinted window and
you don't see what lies beneath.

Q- Is this hard to install?
A- Once I had figured out what I wanted? NO. The alarm-bit was hardest
as this had to comply with the alarm's capabilities, so I used
an optocoupler and an extra transistor. Unfortunately this required
to have an extra power feed for the transistor, but this came from
the harness from the clock together with the ground-connection.
All other "signals" arte tapped off in the relay compartment by
pulling spade-connectors, feeding a bare wire through the hole and
then reconnecting the spade (or put the relay back in the socket).

Q- Do you have an Electronics degree?
A- No I don't, I just read a lot... Call me a Nerd (and proud of it).
No, I do not wear taped glasses nor do I use a pocket protector :-P
Anyway, 90% of this thing has NOTHING to do with electronics, it
could be done with bulbs too, but it wouldn't look as cool or be
maintenance free like LEDs are...

Q- Can/will you provide me with instructions
and/or part# to make one of these things myself?
A- I can and I will, but this takes time; I got everything locally
or from salvage. I'm in the Netherlands, so I'll have to research
If and what is available in the USA or other parts of the world...

For now I THINK I've covered everything, if not just mail me :-)
It could take a while before it get the part# and such as I'm a bit
like Walt; I have an enormous amount of ideas to work on and have
several under hand at the same time, some waiting for inspiration
or parts or whatever.
I just put together a list of what I'm WORKING on in some degree
and came up with 23 projects. This number does NOT include items
still in R&D-phase... of these 23, 19 are car-related and of those 19,
13 are meant to go onto Dagger sometime in the (distant(?))future.

Thanks for all the interest, it's really flattering to get this much
response to something that started out with just tinkering on my ESCORT
after it's engine allmost overheated. But that's another story...

JAN van de Wouw
Thinking Different... Using a Mac...
Living the Dream... Driving a DeLorean...

#05141 "Dagger" since Sept. 2000

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