TommyH

That annunciator box is what drove my design. I work at a nuke plant and we use a similar style annunciator tile system. A lot of what I have invisioned comes from the look of how our control room. It has changed little from the 70s. I’m sure my end product will have little resemblance... but it’s one of my ideas. the CNC machine is a great tool to have. I thought I’d buy one toss some wood up on it then make anything. The reality was a little different, but after about 1 1/2 years I have it dialed in And it has been working well. the cad and cam do take a lot of time, but I enjoy it. For this project I wish I had access to a 3D printer, I would guess that they are better suited for this style work. Did you use one piece of acrylic for the entire annunciator box? I was unsure if the light diffusion through the acrylic would make it look like multiple tiles were lit. I set it up such that each box has its own little piece of acrylic. that was the main reason for the lengthy construction.

Progress..... The Arduino is unforgiving.... one small typo, or assigning 1 pin two times will suck up an entire evening. Anyhow, I have made some progress towards getting prototype #1 fully functional. I think the throttle assembly and the small 3X alarm tile assembly (used in movie for displaying what velocity is displayed) turned out great. I have to figure out a more efficient way to build the small alarm boxes. Glueing each one piece by piece takea forever. the Chinese max7219 7 segment displays are also a little finicky. If you have more time than you know what to do with and want to watch a small demo take a look at the video. Again thanks to everyone! KSP Custom Controller prototype #1

stibbons & freshmeat Thanks for the advice, I am going to look into your sketches. I appreciate your work on this. Getting the arduinos to chit chat and coming up with a design for a mini alarm tile should keep me busy for the next week. It will also keep my wife and kids sick of this project :). Thanks!

So the fun begins...... I'd like to say a big thanks to everyone that has contributed to this project. Ill do my best to share any information that I learn in the process. For anyone interested I have tested the KSPIODeom16 on windows 10 using both an arduino uno (brand name and elegoo) and the mega (elegoo and arduino brand) boards on windows 10 with no immediate issues. I have started out with displaying altitudes on 3 different 7 segment displays running off MAX7219s. It seems if the main loop goes to long the arduino will not connect to the computer. To accomplish writing to 3 different displays I only write to one display per loop. My current delema is writing levels to the adafruit ic2 24 segment bargraphs, it seems as if the adafruit LED library that is used is taking too long on each write and this is causing the arduino to not connect to the pc. My thoughts on this (after skimming through this forum) is to use 2 arduinos. For anyone out there who has done this is my best bet using ic2 or serial communication between the two? Or perhaps is there a better way to transfer data. I am thinking to send the parameters needed to drive all of the displays and indications to the slave arduino. The slave can then take however much time it needs to crunch the numbers and write to the displays without slowing down the master arduino connected to the PC. again thanks to all. Ill do my best to help others, I am new so don'hold your breath.