LED

Guys --

I have come up with another idea for a puzzle, which can be presented on paper or "live". The givens are a bunch of crossword clues and a bunch of what look like broken digital readouts (like on a digital clock) of lengths 3 through 9, and where the LED elements are of various different colors (and yes, RGB combinations play into this). The clues combine with the broken readouts (in a way to be determined by solvers), working back and forth and doing some logical analysis, and eventually an answer emerges. The final answers that I can get are medium-ly constrained -- it must be an answer formable from a subset of a set of 18 specific letters (some repeated), each of which can be used only once (though the repeats can be used as many times as repeated).

The puzzle will be on the hard side -- I'd expect that very good teams will take between 1 and 1.5 hours, but there's lots of solviness to it, so it shouldn't feel boring or like it's "too much work", and no one should get completely stuck on it.

If anyone is so inclined, the broken digital readouts could be made "live" on an actual device (either all of them always on, or having them cycle through), or less spectacular but still cool as an animated image (say, of a computer with blinking lights) projected on a wall (I could even manage to do this in Powerpoint). Though that might (a) be overkill, (b) be impractical for where the puzzle falls, and/or (c) add to the solving length of an already hard puzzle.

I've limited my description of the puzzle here, since if it does not make the rounds for Dr. When, I definitely want to do write it in a different context. But if it sounds like something that would work somewhere, let me know, and let me know what parameters of solution would work, and I'll be happy to design the puzzle.

Thanks,

Dave