Custom Controls
Remote Framing and Focussing Control
A motor driver box, to be used in Monaco Labs' screening room for remote framing and focussing of the projector. I made similar boxes for other motion control installations, which were dubbed "the blue boxes" -- because they had been painted blue in color!
The blue box contained a stepper motor driver and power supply. This particular unit was connected to motors driving the projector's focussing and framing shafts via rubber timing belts. The person sitting in the screening room would turn a knob on a rotary encoder which would in turn send pulses to the stepper motors. Several turns of the encoder would yield only small angular movement of the focus or framing shafts, equivalent to having a large gear ratio.
Projector Frame and Footage Counter
The large-format digital counter display used for inidcating projection footage or elapsed time, also installed in Monaco's screening room. (I last saw the final installed unit supporting the Monaco softball team trophy, no doubt due to the handsome-but-rugged black formica exterior finish...)
The circuitry inside was custom bread-boarded digital TTL logic, including counters for both feet and time, multiplexers, and discrete LED display drivers. The display elements themselves were composed of LED bar-graph units arranged in 7-segment numerical digit layouts.
An electronic current controller for driving multiple colored neon tubes (with Opus modelling.) Used in permanent outdoor neon scupltures by Cork Marcheschi at the Museum of Modern Art in Des Moines, Iowa (a short drive off the I-80 exit for the State Capitol Quadrangle), and the Redevelopment Center in Jamaica, New York (visible when you get off the Long Island Railway station).
The current controller was a triac semiconductor device with zero-current crossing turn-on for insuring smooth operation driving the neon transformers. Fade effects were done with variable-frequency and duty-cycle attack/decay oscillators.
Photos by Penguin Associates Steve O'Neill and Bill Westwick