If you haven’t watched the War Games movie, do yourself a favor & watch it. In the NORAD War Room they have a DEFCON status rig mounted to the wall. At various points throughout the movie they edge closer to DEFCON 1 ‘end of the world’.

Build status: Idea

Materials:

• Timber shadow boxes & frame work to keep it fairly light.
• I want to mount it above my Hack Lab rig, so 15-20cm square for the numbers
• Print the negative numbers & letters on an overhead transparency
• (I need to find the font)
• Sandwich it between 2 x 2mm sheets of perspex.
• Clear perspex / printed transparency / colour perspex.
• LED back light, possibly with diffuser
• Controlled by Arduino w/ Ethernet shield

Here we see the lights in various stages throughout the movie:

I’ll need some reason for the Defcon status to change…  possibly design a software replica of the WOPR and base its AI decision making on how busy my calendar is.  I’ll also need a manual override buttons something like this..

Using these:

• Buttons:  eBay link

• And an RJ11 Curly cord: eBay link
  • RJ11 ends will need RJ11 sockets
  • RJ11 has 4 wires  2 for power & 2 for an I2C conroller then just daisy chain the lot with flat 4 core wire.

• For RJxx reference:
  

And importantly I need to play the alarm wav/mp3 file when the status changes.