Oh the plasma...

Did some more hacking at it... had it running for a whole movie and noticed something disillusioning... There's a very distinctly-shaped blob that never lights up in the upper right corner, and a smaller one in the upper-left corner. I'm pretty sure that means there's a gas-leak which is unrepairable.

I'm glad I didn't invest $150 in driver boards to find this out.

Looking for ideas of what to do with this blasted thing. I remembered that Tesla had a means for lighting a light-bulb (fluorescent?) wirelessly, and thought that might be a cool thing to try. With all those multicolored pixels, it could be pretty cool.

I found *one* video on youtube where a person tried it... and, frankly, it's kinda boring... a spark jumps from a tesla coil and where it hits the screen the screen lights up, white. It seems it shorted a few things out internally, so there're a few blobs that light repeatedly and there are a few horizontal and vertical lines that do as well.
"Plasma vs Tesla"

I guess I was hoping for something less obvious... maybe no sparks, just a wand that lights up pixels as you wave it in front. But, even then, I don't know what would be so cool about it.

Here's a dude who actually connected a neon transformer to the signal lines... The effect is quite awesome, and becomes pretty after about 5 minutes:
Plasma vs Neon transformer

Some awesome images of it here. Like this one:

There's another dude who wields the output of a microwave transformer... it's crazy in that "with my hands I control shittons of electricity" sort of way, but the visual from the screen is less interesting... basically like the tesla coil experiments. Actually, it's better the second time around.

I think I might try the neon transformer... I've got to do *something* to justify and finally lay to rest all the effort I put into this damn thing over the past couple years. And, I've a friend with a neon transformer, so yay!