How to make panels?

For now this is just a list of resources, but we want to add tutorials and examples.

Panel construction

A common way to build flight simulator panels is to cut them from acrylic, using either a CO2 laser cutter or a CNC router. Both of those tools have become more affordable recently, and making your own panels is a pretty good idea.

Acrylic panels can be backlighted, which looks both cool, and is also useful when simulating night flights. For this a common method is to make the panel from two sheets - a transparent mounting plate, and a white plate on top of it as a diffuser for the backlighting. The visible parts of the panel are painted, usually gray, and then the text labels and other markings are engraved, revealing the white plastic. When light is applied from the back, the texts illuminate like on a real cockpit at night.

Assembly

Panels with a matching circuit board can be attached together with 10mm nylon standoff spacers, and 3D printed buttons can be inserted in the panel holes. The buttons have a wider rim around their base that fits the larger cutout on the lower panel, so that the buttons do not fall out.

If the buttons have a led for indicating state, or just to do backlighting of the lettering, the button body can have a hole for the light to pass through. For lettering there might be many possibilities, depending what kind of tools and services are available for you, but 0.8mm engraving plastic used for name tags and such seems to work well as top cap for the buttons.

Note: I have since started to do the bottom clear panel also from 3mm acrylic sheet, since it is way more durable and stiff.

Acrylic can be cut very cleanly with CO2 laser, and CNC router being the other popular tool. While the actual operation and type of the tools are maybe a bit outside the scope of this, many people might take have their first with these things when they want to create panels.

Engraving CNC router

*** please add info here ***

Laser cutting

*** need info here*** , but k40.se is a good resource to read. You need a CO2 laser to cut acrylic, the common laser diode add-ons for popular 3d printers are different wavelength than diode lasers, that do not cut acrylic at all, although you might be able to use them to engrave text on painted acrylic sheet, since they do burn the paint away. But the beam of those lasers just goes through acrylic. The chinese "K40" lasers are very affordable but come with safety caution, so if you want to go this route, start from the website linked above.