Hi all, I am working on my own panels with the idea of selling them. I am not taking orders, I dont know when I will be selling them. Obviously I need to finish development and have them tested for a while.

The first sims I will be supporting are DCS:a10 and general aviation, i.e. fsx, prepar3d and xplane, probably by requiring you to have a copy of fsuipc.

I have written about this a little on another forum but as I am a regular reader here and I know not everyone is over there I thought I would post here too

I can show you a couple of videos. The first is my electronics interfacing with A10 to control the radio and show the radio on the panel. I think you can tell the pcb's have not yet been made and it's not mounted in to a panel! This video was an early peek at seeing something working.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciKNXHshdEk

The second is showing part of a panel being engraved and cut, this one from an A10.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t83b4tyhwm8

and the panel after a quick wipe. I have just started using this material so I need to play around with the setting to get the best effect.

I will add some updates as I go.

ptibldr over at ED has some nice A10 panels, IIRC. No idea if he's selling them now, he was still building last year.

^With Q/C like that no thanks lol!

I doubt I'd be able to afford stuff like this (hence why I make my own) but I know a lot of people have money and will spend on something like this. I've really watched the combat simpit hobby grow over the years and people want to drop cash on this stuff and NOT make it themselves. I think your onto something but the trick will be finding out the market demand for such products. The more you can offer ie various A/C panels will help your bottom line.

Yes, that iphone annoys me sometimes. I can't always remember which way to hold it to get the image right!

Hitch, you are right about covering a few bases. The panels are going to be fairly 'dumb' with logic sitting on the pc, talking to the games and the panels.

I am designing it so that I require only two or three main pcb's and they will attach to the different faceplates. The face plates could be replicas from GA, military, heavy iron etc. No doubt I will put in some generic ones as well.

The same electronics powering the VHF radio on the A10 will be used with a faceplate for a cessna or a airbus radio. It keeps that part of it versatile and all the fiddly code on the PC where it's easy to add functionality.

The software running on the pc is actually using a lot of lua so people who are using the panels can program them to do different things that they may want for themselves, or tweak the behavior a little.

I just need to get time on my side to get some working examples to my testers.

Rotated image :P.

Looks really clean though man, I'm liking it.