HAL 9000 Replicas - beyond the face plate - part I

HAL 9000, the board computer from "2001: A Space Odyssey" is one of the most iconic movie props. Therefore, it it is also very popular among builders of movie replica props. One can find many HAL 9000-related threads in the forums at therpf.com with plenty of information, some of which is nicely compiled at https://sites.google.com/site/theageofplastic3d/hal-9000-camera-panel.

Typical HAL 9000 builds focus solely on the face plate. I also built one of those before, sitting on a 2-inch thick black box. With a IR motion sensor triggering an mp3 sound player module, it is able to play all of HAL's sound bytes from the movie (as compiled here), which makes it a beautiful companion.

Now, I decided to go beyond that and build a HAL 9000 unit that features some of the surrounding area from the movie set. There are seven different locations in the movie (see the images at the top) featuring a HAL 9000 unit:

1. The main console, with eight surrounding monitors.
2. The unit in the rotating hallway with its white frame.
3. The unit in the pod bay room featuring a single monitor.
4. The unit in the room with a view to the outside - with eight monitors.
5. The unit in the room next to the pod bay room, with its six monitors.
6. The unit on top of the entrance to the memory room - this is just the plain face plate.
7. The unit inside the memory room, next to the two rows of 19 acrylic memory modules each.

Of those, #1, #4, #5 would require either six or eight computer screens which would need (at least) three or four Raspberry Pi 4's to control. So, such builds would not only be rather expensive, but they would also occupy huge amounts of space. No. #7, with the 38 acrylic memory modules is really tempting - but again, it would become huge, and probably expensive to build the 38 mechanisms to move the modules. Unit #6 features only the face plate - and this is somehow what I already got from my previous build.

So, what remains are unit #2, from the rotating corridor with its white frame, and unit #3 in the pod bay room with its single screen that displays the recognizable images from the movie. These are the ones that I am planning to build.

In this project, I will not deal with the face plate itself. Instead, I will reuse two unused ones from my previous build. I know very well about their shortcomings, including the poor approximation of the eye (the 100 mm push button) and the front that is too glossy. When I build those, I was rather happy - but now, inspired by many discussions on therpf.com, I think these could be substantially improved. But that is something I keep for later.

I am starting with unit #2...

The HAL 9000 Unit in the Rotating Hallway

I have never come across any photos that show this unit in more detail. So, I'm starting with this image from a BluRay screen capture.

A magnified crop is used to obtain the dimensions, in proportions to the known size of the face plate.

Since there are no screen images from the side, the total thickness is not known. I make it thick enough to fit a decent speaker: 2 1/2" above the 3/16"-thick base plate (so the total thickness is 2 11/16"). The surrounding walls (top, bottom, left, right) are made from two layers of the 3/16" plywood that I'm using with the laser cutter. The white pieces with the horizontal slits will be positioned under a small angle, and such that the center piece (which holds the face plate) is slightly recessed (by the 3/16" thickness of the wood).

Here are the front plates, fresh from the laser cutter.

The internal structures are glued to the back plate...

... and the sides are added.

At this point, I start to spackle (and sand) the inner visible corners so that everything is smooth and rounded.

 

The area behind the slits is painted dark gray,

and some of the front pieces are added.

The area of slits is painted white (so, I can better reach the inner sides of the slits) before these pieces are added.

After more spackling and sanding is done, everything is painted white.  

The inner region is painted black (not shown) and HAL's face plate is removed from the old build and added.

A view on the backside (before any of the electronics is added).

And here is the final unit, ...

... and, again, with one of my older builds, and also featuring my GERTY 3000 (which is, kind of, HAL's grandchild).

The HAL unit in the Pod Bay Room

Since this blog entry is already pretty long, I will feature the building of the Pod Bay room unit in another blog post:

Part II: Building the HAL unit in the Pod Bay Room