DIY Sparks said:
Built with stuff from the garage, enameled heavily, and hung (and locked) from a low tree limb 15 feet from the street.
Plus I didn't mind the exacto-knife letter cutting and detailed brush painting around the stencil outlines.
I was inspired by Sparky's sign! Mine is not completed yet, but all the important parts are there.
Let's see, 10" high 7-segment "LED" digits. I had a vinyl lettering company (SignSpecialist.com) make a reverse 1888 in vinyl sheet (which turned out really nice!) using with a font I found on-line. I applied this to the back of a clear plexiglass sheet. With Coro, I made the segments (sadly, not separately addressable) with Red, Green, and Blue LEDs. To specify an actual frequency, I use black electrical tape to mask out the unneeded segments and voila! Sign!
The "Tune to FM" part is transparent green vinyl on semi-translucent plexiglass. But I had bought and cut out the letters before I found SignSpecialist - or else I would have had them do the letting,. It would have only been $1-$2 more than the transparent sheets I bought!
I still need to make a suitable frame to hold it all together, probably in black with aluminum (or black plastic) L-channel around the edges to hold the plexi in place, then hang on a candy-cane striped PVC pipe outer frame. With 4 channels, I can control the white background, and choose (reasonably) any RGB combination, or cycling, color for 7-segment digits. With some white diffuser behind the cutouts, to obscure the individual LEDs, the digits also appear white in the daylight, and the green letting is visible on the white background: so the sign is also visible during the day time without power [could be good or bad, I guess...]
So, it's still under construction, but I wanted to show it off to someone.
Jimboha