Edge-lit 7-Segment Display Clock Using Raspberry Pi Pico -- Episode-653

I mentioned it previously here   

It would be interesting to see how it behaves with different lighting arrangements.

The corporate imaging guide suggests using self-adhesive opaque vinyl stencils on the rear which suggests minimal edge bleed. However it also mentions on doubling up the light source due to transmission losses which may actually work well for overly bright pixel LEDs.

Yes, it was a perfect excuse! I'd just started this project, and was about to ask someone to do the laser work for me, but then found someone local selling a broken laser.
So £300 but for a good chassis and working controller. Basically replaced everything else, but have a 60W 500x300 laser, need to look at all the parts costs, but I think it'll have come to about £700 all in, so much cheaper than a new machine .

That secret sign perspex looks amazing, I hadn't come across that before. Thanks for sharing, I'm going to see if I can get hold of a sheet to have a play with.

Yes a lot of experimentation. Perspex do a range of acrylic optimised for LED use. They even have the one that appears black until back-lit  Perspex 'Secret Sign' which could have potential for the rear-most position.

Another cuckoo clock diorama idea might be some form of a maker's workshop / FAB Lab.

You could also perhaps mix 3D printed solids at the front of the diorama with the edge-lit acrylic panels behind. The acrylic perhaps forms a window of a house (Lego ?) or a TV/computer screen.

Great build Katie.

I agree, any excuse to buy a laser cutter is enough to do the project.

I really need to experiment more with the styles and types of laser cutting, I bought a bundle of acrylic, but underestimated how many things there would be to try and test different settings, so I really need to order more. The blue robot is a cool idea, and the Garfield would be a cool, although that would probably look great much bigger. Maybe combine 2 slots  so I could use an A5 sheets layered. So with the cuckoo idea, Garfield could swing the chainsaw for the amount of hours.

Moon phase wounds good, I'll have to do a new PCB design with more slots! The tictactoe is a good idea, would be interesting to have it as an interactive game for kids to play with at an exhibition or similar.

Sorry, just realised this comment didn't post on Friday due to an issue with the picture. There isn't any noticeable light spill between the acrylic, the slots go all the way down to the pcb for each slot, like your suggestion.
It's quite hard to capture it in a photo, as there's some reflection surface to surface, I need to play with colours and brightness to see what combination looks the best.

Have you managed to do a test as to what styles of laser engraving on acrylic works best for each case with edge lighting ? 

When doing a diorama then I suspect the best results will be obtained using a mix of line art, hatching and frosting methods. Also the order might come into play here with the line art at the front to keep it sharp and the the frosting toward the rear to soften it.  

The element14 blue robot could make for an interesting study. Can you trap it in 3 dimensions of edge lit acrylic and provide a bit of neon sign like animation with side to side for the body and legs and front to back for the arms ?

The original discussion was based around the cuckoo clock, so common themes there are the mountain chalet weather houses and wood chopping. The traditional people could be replaced by robots. The weather clock could incorporate some form of a thermometer display using both bar and colour to work around the limited 7 layer  resolution. The robot could be chopping a computer in a parody of the Garfield 'compute this' poster.

Another idea might be to look for a photograph that has natural layering and use it to create the background layers with a subject in the foreground in line art.

You could perhaps revisit Episode 610 and turn the space-themed embroidery into edge lit acrylic.

Animating line art geometric patterns in 3D  could work well as you can rotate and scale moving front-to-back and change colour and speed. 

Some 'executive toys' like Newton's cradle might work as well.  

Some animated neon sign effects might work quite well with this setup. Each layer is a different set of neon tubes that can be turned on and off and set to different colours.