Panel meter calculator with floating point

Unusual clocks are a common idea for electronics DIY projects. The difficulty is never the timekeeping part; it’s making the clock look presentable. For my own take on the theme, you can check out the article I posted in May:Some readers might recall that I’m a bit of a calculator nerd. For a while, calculators lagged behind general-purpose computing because of the lack of a suitable display technology. Some of the early designs used ticker tape, cathode ray tubes, or incandescent lightbulb panels to display the result:Casio 14-A with a lightbulb-based display (1957).A bit surprisingly, though, there were scarcely any calculators with electromechanical displays, so I decided to address this glitch.I started with a 3 mm sheet of acrylic. I spray-painted the back side blue:Display panel, rattle-can fun.I then selectively removed some paint with and cut a number of openings on a CNC mills:Display panel, machining.The areas with lettering were then painted again to give these areas…