Hi all,

I'm a graphic designer by trade, and I am currently producing some perspex 'display boards' for a client.

I thought it could be an eye-catching feature to have the company's logo on one of the boards, illuminate when someone walks past.

The LEDs would be situated behind the perspex panel, with the logo in a translucent enough material to allow light to shine through from behind. A motion sensor would need to detect motion, fade the lights up, keep them on for a short while, then fade them down. Ideally, there would also be a switch to turn the lights on, off & allow motion detection.

It will need to be battery operated, therefore I'm unsure whether they'd last very long before having to replace them.

As you can probably tell, I have no experience in electronics/circuits, but I do have a friend who has studied it who is willing to assemble it all.

Basically, my question is, does anybody know the best way to develop such a system? I have about a week & approximately £100/$200 to give anyone who's able to provide expertise to develop it all.

Kind regards,
Dan (northwest UK).

 

How many leds you think you will need?
Whats the logo of the company does look like?
Is your friend able to program microcontrollers?

 

Hi Mike,

The Logo will be approx. 60cm wide, so don't know if you could advise on the amount of leds?

It is very similar to the Westinghouse (http://www.westinghouse.com) logo.

Yeah, I think he is able to program microcontrollers, though unsure if he's got the equipment necessary.

 

If you make a satin-textured "vee" cut in a perspex/acrylic/Lucite/plexiglas sheet, and shine light edgewise into the sheet, just the cut section will illuminate. This can make for very interesting effects; it'll look like the logo is simply floating in midair.

Big Clive in the UK sells an RGB controller kit, that has various patterns programmed into it. That could make for an interesting display.
His home page: http://www.bigclive.com/
Controller assembly page: http://www.bigclive.com/rgbcont.htm

You could power the display with a 12v sealed lead-acid battery.
[eta]
For detecting people moving near the display, one might use something like these PIR (Passive Infrared) sensor kits:
http://www.electronickits.com/kit/complete/surv/ck209.htm
Kits like that could be used to power up/power down the RGB controller and LEDs. The display would turn off when no motion was detected.

 

24" Wide? Can't help you too much on a lot of it, but one thought occurs. Would ultaviolet be good? As in making the plastic logo fluoresce?