Cessna Power Panel
I was able gather a few parts from Amazon and Ebay to get what's pretty close to a Cessna power panel. Here's the inspiration (bottom lower left):
Process:
1. Get the parts: Amazon.com (these are the "prime" prices, so you can probably get for less in exchange for shipping patience.
On Ebay (Link):
These little buttons make excellent faux fuses. At 10 for $2, you can add a nice touch to your panel to complete your check-lists, etc.
2. Design the Panel. It's originally designed in Fusion360 (Link). This design is totally parametric, so feel free to change Parameters like swToggleHoleSize (the rest will automatically resize) to adjust for your own components.
5. White Labeling: This can be one of the more difficult things for cockpit builders. You can't print white with inkjet printers (it's just the absence of color on paper). I found a great solution. There's a label printer from DYMO Label Manager 280 (Amazon Link) for about $20 that supports a "white on clear" cartridge (Amazon Link) for another $10. Also, this machine can be hooked up to your computer (USB) and you can print the graphics directly as rendered in Inkscape. Print, cut close to letters, apply.
6. Next step, wiring to an Arduino (less than $10 on Amazon) board and interacting with the switches from x-plane through USB. There's a great x-plane plugin and Arduino library that makes this super easy -- It's called Ardsim: http://arduino.svglobe.com/
Hi there Gabriel, great job you have done there. I have built kind of the same but the entire lower panel in one place. You can check my website here:
ReplyDeletehttp://flyingforfun.weebly.com/cessna-172-cockpit.html
Regards
AlbEagle
You're doing a great job on that and your "instructable" style is great -- I've been following it. How did you wire the start/mag switch? Multiple GPIOs or single analog? How did you do your white labeling?
DeleteThanks. Start switch is only a two position switch (motorcycle key from ebay - china for less then $2 link is on the website), so only two wires needed - signal and gnd. I was looking at 5 position keys but they are expensive (the cheapest one i found was around $39.90) so i'm using that two position key for now. As for the white labels, I have just printed the sheets that you can find on the website. Since the print paper is white, all you have to do is set the background color the same as your panel, this way the letters will be in white and then cut the labels as close to the letters as possible. On my website you can find the templates (they are psd files so you can modify them easily with paint.net or photoshop or gimp. I liked your circuit brakes. I have ordered some from ebay, they are a little bit different but should do the job, they are red and black so i will have to paint them white. I'm thinking on printing the circuit brakes numbers on white paper and then cut them in circle the size of the cap and glue them unless you have used another method ( i guess you have used transparent sheet with that label printer from internet). The other option i'm thinking is to print the numbers on a transparent sheet and glue them on the caps. Anyway keep up the good work, it is always good to see and find ideas how people make DIY stuff :)
DeleteRegards
AlbEagle
For the circuit breakers I used the same label printer, but just printed black on white (separte cartridge) -- I guess you could just do that with a regular printer. To cut my near perfect circles, after printing, I used a standard paper hole-punch. The standard paper hole is about the same size as the breaker caps. :-)
DeleteWOW!! Nice work and thank you for sharing.
ReplyDeleteWOW!! Nice work and thank you for sharing.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.cockpitturk.com/urun/cessna-switch-panel/65/
ReplyDeletehey, nice job, I´ll be modifying the panel a little bit to fit my needs, can you tell me the font and the size you used for the text please?
ReplyDelete