Billboard lighting.

HO size led lamps from eBay, there are I believe “goosenecks” which I turn upside down to shine up onto the billboard. Could also use them from the top to shine down. 

The smaller HO size looks better in my view than the O. 

Search WeHonest on eBay

Readily available LED lighting strips can be mounted on the billboard cat-walk pointing upwards.  If you're not comfortable with wiring individual LEDs and working at the component level (diodes, etc.) you can just use lighting modules as used in passenger cars.  These take AC accessory voltage and do the necessary electronic magic to convert the voltage to DC to drive the LED strips.   Most LED strips have 3 white LEDs equally spaced over a 2-inch section.  Some LED strips have 3 LEDs per inch.

stan2004 posted:

Readily available LED lighting strips can be mounted on the billboard cat-walk pointing upwards.  If you're not comfortable with wiring individual LEDs and working at the component level (diodes, etc.) you can just use lighting modules as used in passenger cars.  These take AC accessory voltage and do the necessary electronic magic to convert the voltage to DC to drive the LED strips.   Most LED strips have 3 white LEDs equally spaced over a 2-inch section.  Some LED strips have 3 LEDs per inch.

 

 

I never thought of that, thanks. I like that powerball billboard, how were you able to get the digital jackpot number?

Note the 4 upward aiming flood lamps on the cat-walk of the prototype:

The use of thin flat surface-mounted LEDs as used on the lighting-strips is/was motivated by the prototype.  The traditional domed LEDs (3mm style shown below) project a narrow conical beam which would have more of a spotlight effect on the billboard rather than the desired wide-angle floodlight effect.

As for the Powerball model itself, the jackpot display was a custom-built circuit using a 3-digit 7-segment LED displays.  The circuit would randomly increase the jackpot value every so often and reset back to 10 million when someone "won"

Here's a short video showing how it was built and the digital jackpot increasing - always gets a chuckle from visitors.  I built this over 10 years ago before LED strips were common so you see individually hand-mounted surface-mount white LEDs.

That's pretty cool. That's a neat idea. Thanks. The strip may actually be the way to go. I'm going to do some experimenting and see what result I like best