This was a model I never thought I would see, but I should have guessed, that in a world now driven by 3D printing, someone was likely to bring it to life.
They did and the product is available for sale and download through CGTrader.com
"Badjer1" has created a set of models, from which the interior walls, "speaker box" housing for electricals and a set of spacers to help mount the assembled interior into the external "light box" can all be printed. The product goes by the name of "HAL Book Nook" and was originally designed to fit into a small area of a bookshelf.
In the original size of the model, the front "frame" for the HAL-terminal appearing part of the model, would not fit on either of the print surfaces of my PDM Or SLA printers, so I decided to scale it down and do the parts on the printer that made the most sense.
The largest parts - the front frame and the speaker box with cover - were done on my Creality Ender 3 FDM printer, while the interior wall section of the Memory Room were done using our Creality HALOT-One resin printer. The entire model was originally intended for resin (SLA) printing.
Our version turned out to be 70% of the original. Once all the interior walls were printed, we assembled them onto the surface of sections of 1/8" thick transulcent Red acrylic sheet. The goal is to "back-light" these assembled panels to get each "memory slot" to glow red.
There are areas of the model which need to have white light coming through, such as the area where HAL's "higher function" memory cards are located - the ones Bowman is set to disconnect. We got this effect by using a Dremel tool to open the space in the Red acrylic below the specific location and place a thin (0.015 mm) layer of clear plastic over the opening. This would support the printed elements from behind and allow white LED light to pass through.
In the original version, the round door leading into the chamber is closed off with a disk of White acrylic. I was not in favor of this approach. Instead, I took a scanned copy of the HDA Modelworks decals set, used on the ParaGrafix Discovery Flight Deck PE Set and printed the wall of Discovery's "Ante-Room" across from the HAL door opening and placed that print on the back wall of the light box. The round opening now has a "tunnel" just as the movie set chamber did, with the "best guess" at reproducing the graphics of the tunnel walls from the film that I could do.
The exterior "light box" was made from 1/8" thick White acrylic sheet, with strips of warm white LEDs on all of the interior surfaces. The printed spacers were used to locate and support the HAL chamber assembly inside. I made the light box long enough to accommodate the door tunnel, plus a 3/4" gap back to the back wall and the Discovery wall print.
As the front frame is a replication of a HAL terminal, there's a small area on the left (normally, the bottom) where a speaker resides. Our model also uses a 1.1" diameter computer speaker, connected to a DFPLayer MP3 card, which runs the entire Bowman/HAL segment of the film audio.
A relativley close-up view of the entire front. I used a fine stainless-steel mesh over the speaker area, and the flash got through, so you can see the speaker inside. The area through the tunnel is bright, in comparison to the rest, so it "flares" and becomes impossible to see the detail.
Dave Bowman, hovering over HAL's "higher-function" memory cards. The 3D printed elements have different cards in slightly different heights, showing which have been "released."
The Bowman figure is actually a Frank Poole figure, offered by Max Gruter as "Death Astronaut" in 1/9 scale, to match the big Moebius EVA Pod model. I scaled it down to work with our version.
I used a paper copy of the Anteroom Wall detail provided by HDA Modelworks, as part of their decal set for the Paragrafix XD-1 Cockpit Detail Set, to provide the appropriate "view" out the entrance to HAL's Memeory Room, as it would appear onboard Discovery.
