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Post by thefrog on Mar 28, 2015 11:46:09 GMT
 Hi Mark I'm attaching a photo of my just-completed autopilot panel. It was wholly inspired by your excellent Kindle book and Youtube series, for which many thanks! I finally got it assembled and working last night. And I'll admit before anyone says anything, I know that it's not perfect - I found it quite hard to cut the acrylic in a straight line, but drilling the holes was fine using brad-point bits. I used Adobe Illustrator for the graphics which worked very well because each caption and graphic element was easily moveable. All components were sourced from Leo Bodnar, Rapid Online and Maplin. Luckily, I already had a sheet of acrylic - I couldn't believe the price of it in B&Q! I'm not using LINDA because I wanted to make it useable in the majority of my rather large collection of aircraft and I understood (perhaps wrongly) that LINDA is aircraft specific so it would have been a lot of work to configure all my planes with it! But assigning buttons through FSUIPC alone seems to have worked fine for this panel. If I was to make the panel again I might explore the option of using rotary switches which include a push switch to enable a change to fast increment/decrement: as it is, it's quite slow to turn quickly to a heading/course, altitude or speed if this involves more than a few degrees. I designed the panel to attach to the top of my Saitek Switch panel, which worked well except that the whole unit now bends backwards a bit when I press an autopilot button! It needs to be braced in some way from behind to prevent this. I'm now planning to do a comms panel with COM, NAV, ADF and a flaps switch. Again many thanks for your inspiration and I would appreciate any comments from yourself or any forum members. (I'm not sure if the photo will show up - if it doesn't, I'll re-post) David |
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Post by MarkH on Mar 28, 2015 12:39:16 GMT
Hi David. That is fantastic - it is truly a thrill to see something that looks like mine but different. I think it is absolutely the best thing for people to innovate and come up with different designs. As for using LINDA, it doesn't have to be aircraft-specific. You can make a LIB file that you can map functions to no matter which aircraft you have loaded. (That's what the AA library file is, for example.) Once you have done that there is also an 'inheritance' feature - if you make your mappings for the FSX default aircraft, any new aircraft profile you create will have these mappings by default. You can then override them in the specific aircraft profile if you want. I'm not sure if all that makes sense, but I am confident you can do what you need to! Regarding the rotaries - I would definitely recommend the centre-push ones, for the reason you suggest. You could probably just swap them out fairly easily I would have thought, depending on how your wired the ground connections. It looks like you used the short-shaft rotaries too - I just got some of these as I noticed they have started stocking them. A shame they're a quid more expensive  Anyway, well done and keep us posted on any changes and new panels! [P.S. About your 'bendy' panel. It will be better braced, but I wanted to check which brand of the black square buttons you used. Rapid currently sells two identical-looking switches, White Label (order code 50-1069) and SCI (order code 78-0112). The latter are cheaper but have a much stronger spring and for this reason I don't think they are suitable. (The way to tell them apart is the cheaper ones have square-ended solder tags and the White Label ones are rounded.) Just a thought.] |
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Post by thefrog on Mar 28, 2015 13:41:45 GMT
Hi Mark
Thanks for the great feedback. The black square buttons are 50-1069 but Rapid were out of red buttons so I got that one from Maplin and it has square solder tags and does have a stronger spring, now you mention it. I do have to press all the switches quite hard to make sure that they contact, so I wondered if next time I could find ones that click when they connect - that would make it more obvious that the button has engaged the relevant function.
David
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Post by ScottB on Mar 28, 2015 14:53:20 GMT
Hello David.
That looks great! Looks pretty perfect to me, with all the labels readable and buttons nicely spaced. What's amazing is that it looks as good if not better than the Saitek switch panel it's resting on! I had to brace my radio stack too. The cuts look straight, more so than mine and I had a belt sander! I'm not sure how he came up with it but, Kudos to Mark for all this, his creativity. Nice work.
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richts
Almost Aviator
Posts: 21 
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Post by richts on Mar 28, 2015 14:57:25 GMT
My 2 cents says looks great well done, great accomplishment
Rich
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Post by thefrog on Mar 29, 2015 0:00:37 GMT
Thanks Rich and ScottB for your comments - much appreciated.
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Post by thefrog on May 31, 2015 11:39:39 GMT
Hi I've now completed my second panel, also inspired by your Youtube videos Mark. This time it's smaller and is sets NAV1, NAV2 (with dual concentric rotary encoders) and ADF frequencies, with a flaps switch (this is a Momentary ON, OFF, Momentary ON type from Maplin). It's not a comprehensive panel but it does what I need it to do! Many thanks for your inspiration www.fsfiles.org/flightsimshotsv2/image/4YqDavid |
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Post by MarkH on May 31, 2015 12:44:24 GMT
I've now completed my second panel Ha, great! I like the shelf brackets, that's a good idea. |
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