My First "Real" Panel

[BTilson]

It's completely arbitrary and will never serve any actual function in my (currently non existent) pit, but it's my first panel that I've made that I would actually consider of a decent enough quality to PUT in a pit. The switches are pretty arbitrarily labeled, and completely incorrect and wrong, but that's not what I was after.

I drew up the panel in about 20 minutes at the end of my shift at work today, printed out several copies and laminated them. I cut a piece of .080" plexiglass to size, used spray adhesive to attached the laminated panel image, then drilled out all the holes with my drill press. Put in my switches, and ta-dah! It looks like a panel!

Just thought I'd share. It's the first thing I've made so far that I am actually proud of! Even though it does nothing, and never will do anything, I felt that it was worth sharing. It gives me a big boost of confidence in my abilities to eventually make something kind of like an airplane cockpit.

Check it out:

[beaky]

That looks real sharp; been thinking of doing the same thing for my panels.
what kind of printer and paper did you use?

[BTilson]

The printer is a Brother HL5240 Laser Printer. Pretty pricey printer I think, but it's my departments printer here at work. The paper is just plain old printer paper, nothing special about it at all. I drew the panel up in Front Panel Designer (link on this forum in the resources sticky) and printed it out. The neat thing about that program is that it let's you do a 100% to scale print of the panel. So I just printed that off, laminated it and used it that way. I think it turned out pretty nice.

Thanks, by the way!

[JBaymore]

Congratulations on the first panel.  I remember those first "mock up" days....... they are very exciting.

Now start planning the first "real" fake aircraft panel.  

best,

.................john

[BTilson]

Right now the main thing I need to work on is figuring out how I want to interface all my hardware. I know FSUIPC can control all FS variables, so I am thinking about buying some joystick controller cards and mapping those through FSUIPC offsets, and getting a KE72 or something similar for the non FS stuff like FreeFD.

I am getting close!! I've been tinkering with this stuff for probably a year now, and I finally feel that I am getting my head around it enough to actually BEGIN! Haha.

Thanks John!

[BAW19]

I can recommend Beta Innovations. I use their boards for all my rotary encoders and switches. Really good prices too and they come with an SDK. I have my first 'air driver' on order at the moment so I can motorise an analogue