Dynamic Windows

When I started planning Project: OSIDIAS, I took a different approach than I had in the past. This was the first project I’d drawn out and planned completely in CAD. I normally love the challenge of doing things on the fly, however, this time space was a bigger concern than ever. I couldn’t start the project only to find out that I should have made one small change several steps earlier.

One of the benefits to starting in CAD, is that it gives me lots of opportunity to play with parts placement before committing to aluminum. This is especially important here, since the main body of the case will be cut and bent out of a single piece of 2mm aluminum sheet. Any miscalculations would be costly with material that large.

Although I had planned on starting this project a month ago, the delay has given me time to make a few revisions and explore some new ideas. So, thanks in part to partial inspiration from a thread by redders on the bit-tech forums, I came up with an idea I’m going to expand on. I’ve long thought about having fun with transparent LCD’s, so it was time for a little experiment. The following is a standard 7″ LCD removed from it’s housing, and with all backing and polarizing film removed. What we have here, is what I intend to use as the side panel windows on OSIDIAS. For lack of a better term, I’ll call them dynamic windows. You can see that as long as there is a light source behind the LCD, dark objects and text is shown through. Granted, colors would be slightly washed out, but the concept is still sound…

When the windows are ‘off’, they are a simple tinted panel. However, once on, they could be used to display temps, sponsor logos, screensavers, or pretty much anything I would choose. So, are we having fun yet?