I am planning on printing this city, but am having trouble figuring out how to do the LED billboards/signs. Any suggestions on how to get these to look good and how to do the backlighting?
How big should be for example the billboard on the left side at your final print?
Probably around 4 inches tall
Than you should be able to print this multicolor easily (maybe reducing color quantity or using a 0.2 nozzle). As a background I would go for a light strip with a diffusor in front of and same distance to the billboard.
You could always use OLED displays as the billboards and even animate them. Adafruit.com has a number of possibly suitable displays that could be used and the micros to drive them. There are software examples ready to go where bmp images get displayed.
Lithophanes might be another way for light up static images. Depending on size may need to go 0.2mm nozzle maybe?
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That’s a good suggestion. You’d have to size the model to fit the displays, but there are quite a few fairly high-resolution OLED panels that come in “unusual” sizes. Like this one I used for one of my projects, which is something like 1" x 4"…
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Thank you, I didn’t realize you could get displays like this, how would I set this up?
If you are starting from scratch it will take some time to learn how to put together a system but Adafruit has a number of examples complete with parts lists and code that you can expand on and use your own images.
They have little TFT and OLED displays that many microcontrollers can drive over a simple serial connection between them. You can do animated and static displays. You could even draw in a box in a billboard like some have showing time and temperature, gas prices, etc.
Here’s a how-to for a 2.2” TFT display. It wraps up all sorts of concepts and can be intimidating, but they have a user forum and discord channel. Their website is a bit hard to follow at first but tons of information. And the interface and software will all be very similar between the displays.
Also, I have no interest or connection to Adafruit. They just have a cool selection of parts and publish all sorts of guides and code.
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If you want to use a real display and have a slightly easier development environment I’ll point out ESPHome has support for displays: ESPHome — ESPHome
Under the covers it translates a YAML config file you create into code using the same facilities as Adafruit, but doesn’t require you to get into coding quite as much. Also if you happen to use Home Assistant for automation you could do all kinds of crazy stuff like having all the lights come on at sunset and coordinate their signs.
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I hate to ask, but is there any way at all to do something like this without coding?
Depends on what you consider coding. Warning: I am a career programmer and into geeky things. But the Adafruit tutorials are absolutely going to send you in the coding direction. ESPHome gives you a way to describe what you want more in the style of a config file than actual code, but you do have to be willing to dive into things a bit.
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The good news is that ESPHome is very easy to install as a plugin to Home Assistant which you can install on a cheap Raspberry Pi Computer. The bad news is that while other installation methods are quite possible, they are more complicated.
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Ok, that is cool. 
1234
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Just an example, ignore the components on the left that aren’t being used, but this is a round LCD display and an a Wemos ESP32 microprocessor, a bunch of wires and a USB power supply and I programmed this with ESPHome. The device is connected to my wifi, connecting to my Home Assistant installation, setting the correct time, and getting the local outside temperature and switching between the two. Those displays cost me $4 each and about the same for the processor.
Like I said this is a very techie thing to play with, but these days the toys are awesome.
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Wow that looks cool, and surprisingly cheap. I will need 5-10 screens, would I need multiple microprocessors or just one?
While it’s technically possible to hook multiple displays to a single processor that gets a little fancy (and all of this is new to you). I just happened to pick those round displays, there are a bunch of other shapes and sizes.
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Don’t know if you’re old enough to know what drive in movie was, but if you felt like adding a retro touch you could have a raspberry pi computer running home assistant on the back of their 7" touch display as the movie screen for a drive in theater which just happens to be controlling all the tech for the rest of the setup including ESPHome processors. And the pi would provide the web based config environment for the processors.
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In case he’s still wondering of what you’re referring to when talking about drive in movie theaters, here’s some visual clarification
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Yeah, I wouldn’t have known about them if they weren’t in a book I read
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Adafruit has a bunch of demo programs and you might get lucky that one or more do exactly what you want, but probably more likely you’ll need to at least modify something.
Having had some kind of programming class somewhere along the line would be a big help. The kinds of things being mentioned here are pretty easy to do but it can be very hard conceptually if no background. There’s lots of how-to videos out there that you could check out and see if anything makes sense or not.
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