Yes, I’m aware ChatGPT can’t be trusted 100%. But I think it provides some useful material worth looking into. ChatGPT *believes *it is the 216C because it is 80 px whereas th 215C was around 60 px. Again, ChatGPTs belief.
It’s a jumping off point!
I wonder if maybe it wasn’t the manufacturer, but a sales vendor logo. Perhaps the manufacturer didn’t sell direct and production sourced from an NYC or LA vendor.
Yeah, the other possibility is that the sign was based on a commercially available led sign board and modified to their requirements.
What might be worth looking into are films from the late '80s/early-'90s that are set in financial institutions/brokerage firms/stock markets and who had big stock tickers prominently on display, it looks like it was around that time that they were switching away from the older flip-disc displays (like in Trading Places) to LED matrix units (like in Die Hard With a Vengeance). It’s not a safe bet, but we might find a match.
I did give Die Hard a quick watch, but none of the logos on the LED matrices in the Subway scene looked similar.
This is exactly my point though. There is no 216C, there has never been a 216C. ChatGPT made it up. It effectively said “The 215C is close but it’s 90px, and the input request is asking for 80px, so I’ll just invent a fictional model 216C which meets that requirement”. The 200 series had a 215, and a 220, but never a 216. So we’re either wasting our time looking for details on a model which doesn’t exist, or we rule out a path of research which actually could have revealed the correct answer (all because we’re too confident that the Ecto used a product by this company, when there’s zero evidence to actually confirm this). I’m not ready to say “the logo definitely doesn’t belong to the manufacturer”, because it still very much could.
Even ChatGPT (with an empty input context) doesn’t think the 216C really exists.
From what I’ve found, the Ecto’s were 221 inches long. This was one of the few side-on photos I could find, so I imported it into FreeCAD and scaled the image to those dimensions.
That seems to make the sign around 208x27cm. I’m going to assume it was manufactured to imperial measurements, so I think that means approx 82x10 inches?
The LED display itself is smaller than the enclosure it’s installed inside. I think it’s closer to 81x7 inches.
Again, hard to know if I’ve calibrated the photo correctly, so these are only approximate dimensions. But it’s possible we could actually be looking for an 80x7" sign with an 80x7 pixel layout. Or maybe I’m connecting dots that aren’t there.
At the very least, if we can see that a specific model is much smaller than 200cm or 80" wide, then it’s definitely incorrect.
I was looking through the Ghostbusters reference library, and came across this photo of the 1a dot board. But in it, there appears to be a line of yellow LED’s as well. I thought it was fading at first, but it’s too perfectly consistent with the other red and green lights. Is it just me seeing things? Or has this already been established? They are right above the green one’s.
I’ve merged the two topics together due to the shared subject. 
I’m afraid the “yellow LEDs” is an optical illusion, the boards only had red and green light clusters: LINK
Exactly what I was going to reply with :lol:
In some shots it does look like yellow, but this is just because the red and green pixels are both on at the same time:
I know I’m not the most knowledgeable person in this subject, but if there still is not a definite, “this was the board they used on the original 1A, and here is why” then could it be posible that it’s an old stock ticker? it would make sense in the red and green color pattern, and the average number on this board is 5 “pixels” in length, and that can fit quite the few decimal places. If this is far off, then I apologize for reviving a thread.
Sorry that I’m super late to the party on this fun one… basically posting to remind myself to find a way to get you all the reference photos from the E1A we took for the Ecto Manual. Hopefully they’ll be of some help!
1 Like
Well this is one of my favorite threads now.
Building a working LED sign board using 5mm LEDs in the red and green is something I have always wanted to do.
3 Likes
Hope that these are of some help in uncovering the mysteries… (sidenote, AJ loving that we can upload photos natively now, but also why am I a namebunchanumbers now? Haha).
6 Likes
Outstanding! Thankyou for sharing these! Might be helpful for anyone trying to build one and get close to the correct scale.
Apologies to anyone who used my previous guesstimate, I was way off.
The photos show it was actually 80x7 inches 
(That’s 203.2x17.8cm)
I still don’t think this particular model is going to be easy to find (the manufacturer labels have been missing for decades), but that was never really the point of this thread (it was more about the text/animations/sequence so it can be replicated accurately).
1 Like
WHOA! These are great, Troy! Thanks for posting. Ghost Corps should restore one and have it running in the lobby like an old office from the 90s.
The research in this thread has been really, really cool to see.
1 Like
I will fix that for you. I need to find your old account.
Holy moly, those are ■■■■■■■ awesome.
1 Like
Just tinkering.
(Ignore the bad photoshop on the green LEDs, they were all red so I just crudely recolored them).
It wouldn’t be too hard to figure out a way to make modules like this. Basically 10 modules, 4,480 LEDs total. In theory you could build the whole thing for around $300.
3 Likes
Thanks to everyone in this thread — I’ve turned the reference work here into a working animation of the full sign loop: a ready-to-load CoolLED1248 file (16×96), plus open frame data (JSON, PNG frames, GIF and an Arduino/C header) for anyone building their own sign.
Full write-up, credits and downloads: Screen-accurate ECTO-1A sign animation — CoolLED file + open data for any LED build
Every screen, colour and effect is traced back to the posts and images in this thread, with an evidence card for each. A few things are still inferred, because nobody has documented exactly how they look:
- the shimmer
- the direction of the colour wipes
- the geometry of the five lines → green boxes graphic
Also still unknown: GONNA’s colour, and YOU’s highlight colour in TO BELIEVE YOU.
If anyone has clear footage of any of those, I’ll update the files to match. And for anyone working on hardware (like the module mock-up above), the frame data uses the same off / red / green / both values proposed earlier in this thread, so it should drop straight in.
1 Like
This is very great information guys that you share ,keep on.
2 Likes