Hardware & Technical My button box project

Viking84

Viking84
Time for another update!

I've been working on labeling options the past couple of days. Turns out that UV print is prohibitively expensive (over 100 pounds!!), which leaves me with 3 options:

1. Print to acrylic. Quality will be great, but it will be behind 5mm of acrylic making it harder to read, and potentially tricky to fasten switches too.
2. Print to aluminium. Again, great quality, and this time printed onto the front of the aluminium. Sadly everywhere that does this uses thin aluminium layers sandwiched onto plastic, which will potentially be difficult to cut, less solid than ideal, and possibly damaged by mounting of switches.
3. Print to a sticker, stick it on, drill holes, cover in clear lacquer. Quality is very good if my test-print to photo paper is anything to go by, but it will look a bit glossy.

All in all it is looking like option 3 is my best bet. I can control the scaling myself, ensuring that it is correct, and once I've matched the gray tone of the print to the colour on the box, and add a little bit of texture to it, I think it will look rather good!

Picture of my test-print cut to shape:

 
Last edited:

Viking84

Viking84
Test fitting the button box in my sim-rig. These aluminium profiles are great for adding additional components to the rig, and absolutely rock solid. Still waiting for the A4 stickers to arrive (hopefully early next week) so that I can print the labeling for the faceplate and start drilling.

Also waiting for my temporary replacement throttle (Thrustmaster TWCS), and new flight pedals (MFG Crosswind) to arrive so that I can actually go flying again, most likely all arriving next week. Turns out my Virpil grips still work, only the base got fried, so I have put that on my Warthog base until the Brunner Force Feedback setup arrives in July.

 

Viking84

Viking84
Things are progressing! First soldering and hookup test yesterday to see if the cards worked the way I thought :) All the parts have arrived, just waiting for the final piece of the puzzle which is the A4 sized stickers I need for the front panel - once that is in place I can start drilling, mount all the buttons and get going on the soldering process. I reckon the soldering will take quite a few evenings given the amount of functions this box has...

 

Forcit

F
Looking good.

Did the wires come with the connector already attached or did you buy them separately and put them on yourself?
 

Viking84

Viking84
Bought some ribbon cables with connectors already attached :) Just stripped off one end and soldered to the button. As little manual work as possible is the goal - wish all the buttons came with the same type of pins and I could have skipped the soldering all together!
 

Viking84

Viking84
So, the A4 stickers arrived - not a great success. The paper is really poor quality which results in fuzzy lines and a bad finish. The plan now is to get some spray on glue and use proper photopaper instead, will do a test tonight if I need to lacquer it or not :)

On the positive side the stickers were easy to drill through, leaving fairly clean holes which will easily be tidied up with the mounting hardware for the switches. Hopefully the photopaper will behave in the same way - that will also be tested this evening!
 

Viking84

Viking84
Spray on glue was just the ticket! Printed to high quality photo paper, made sure to get the scaling right (no enlargement for borderless printing and so on), applied a liberal amount of spray on glue to both the face plate and the printout, and now it is solidly stuck on!

Letting it dry for a few hours now before I start drilling holes. I did a test-piece which I also drilled after only an hour of drying, and the results were great, nice clean cut into the applied photo paper, no tearing or anything like that. Once the buttons are mounted it should look really good!

 

Viking84

Viking84
It is really quite good, and not as expensive as feared! That said I have given up keeping track on what I have spent on this project...
 

Viking84

Viking84
Today has been a very productive day! Got all the holes drilled on the front panel, and mounted all the buttons :) Incredibly pleased with the result :D Wish I could have got all the nuts lined up for the toggle switches, might work a bit more on that - sadly due to manufacturing tolerances they don't all end up in the same place when they "bottom out", so it takes a LOT of fiddling.

First cuts:


All done with the drilling and ready for assembly:


Finished panel - note that the single rotary encoders are too long, have cut them down now so the knobs are mounted tighter to the panel :)


Tomorrows work - wire all this together!
 
Last edited:

Viking84

Viking84
Done with the soldering! Got it all hooked up and tested, everything works apart from one rotary encoder that seems to be defective (checked the wiring again and again but it is still acting strangely).

Tomorrow I will be setting this up in Joystick Gremlin to create the needed vJoy's (5 x 32 button joysticks, seems few games can read 64 button devices) - and then hopefully going out flying in X-Plane and Elite :D

First steps with soldering:


All the buttons hooked up to wires:


And finally the first card is hooked up. Once the second one was done I was so tired I forgot to take pictures :p Got everything sqeeeeezed into the button box case in the end and hooked up to the PC! Amazingly I only found one fault that I had made, and only one defective button. Pretty good really for a home build :)
 
Last edited:

Viking84

Viking84
Ended up with three suppliers in the end (not counting all the tools!):

Leo Bodnar - boards + rotary encoders
Mouser - buttons, toggles and box
Kjell & Company (local) - Wires + soldering equipment

The wires were not of the best quality, uneven sizing of the connectors meant that some worked perfectly and others required a LOT of force to go in which was a bit dicy. When I get home from work tonight I will be doing a bit more testing with the defective encoder to make 100% there isn't an issue with the board itself - once that is done I might be able to start using the thing ;)
 

Forcit

F
Did they have those cables in the local store? As in you just went in and asked them if they had them in bundles and you were able to buy them like that with one connector in one end and nothing in the other? May I ask how much they charged you for each cable?

Have been searching their website and have not been able to find them there. But really nice if they had them in store like that, saves time and money I guess.
 

Forcit

F
That is a really nice piece of work.
Looking really good.

If only now the were a button that puts every button into its "start" position so that you can start from scratch if you are in like dcs where you die and have to start over with the start up procedure :D.

And no wonder I didn't see the cables when I was looking, didn't think they were attached to eac other like that :), thanks for that link.

Edit:
Was the box just plug and play within the game? Just plug the usb cable in then go into the game and assign the switches and buttons?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom