The Caution Panel (with a Typo) - A10C Warthog Simulator

[Music] all right so welcome back to the channel today i'm going to be talking about the caution box so i'm going to be ripping this out of here and i'm going to pull it apart on the workbench and i'll show you how i made it it's pretty simple panel i'm also going to show you how i cut and engraved the front indicator part i've seen a lot of people make these and there's you can see the white text i basically reverse engrave this so you can't see that when it's not on you can only just barely make out the text that's in there but when it lights up you can read it pretty well so the plans for this are publicly available the link is in the description um you can download them it's my design it's by no means supposed to be a replica of the one in an a10 so the one in the a10 is a collection of individual indicators whereas mine is just one big panel that runs it all it's one sheet of plastic that i've engraved the reason i need to redo the front of it though is because somebody who downloaded it pointed out a glaring issue that i've never noticed and that is that there's a typo in it you can see that there is two left all wrong tab indicators where the one on the right should be the right other on tab indicator um that goes to show that in the five years this has been in the cockpit i've never had a right aileron tab failure so i've never seen that indicator like other than when i'm holding the test button like i am right now so what i'll do now is i'll rip it out of the cockpit and i'll show you how i made it so here is the caution box out of the cockpit you can see it's a really simple panel um it looks like a spaghetti nightmare that's only because it's so squeezed together this is a fidgets 64 led card so there was no custom programming there was no anything to get this one working literally all it is is these cables come with it all i had to do was solder on leds all right you can see when i pull this apart it's just a network of spaghetti so all those cables come with the clips that go into this card um so all i had to do was snip the ends off and solder led tabs to them okay so one of the drawbacks of this card is you can't share the earth so every led has two cables going up to it which was what looks like a complete mess but that card means you can run 64 leds um and program them in dcs using a program called helios which i'll show you in a second to get them to light up when the game sends it a signal i don't actually have to pull that apart or remove any of the leds or anything for this or want so i'm going to screw that back together and just remove the top plate okay so you can see that these standoffs which hold the back plate on also go straight through the panel and hold the whole panel together so i just need some allen keys in there to remove the top surface all right so now that those screws are undone this whole top part here will just lift off uh and that is just a spacer which is stuck together just because it was paint these things here are just small cutouts of plastic i'm sorry wait for it to focus nothing special about them it's a translucent white the only purpose it serves is to diffuse those leds so these leds if you just left them like that you can see there's two per indicator um when you when they illuminated you can actually see that there's two leds and it doesn't look very good so the only purpose these things serve is to diffuse that light you can also see that half of them are burnt and they look terrible that that was burnt in the laser these little this thing here was the first thing i ever did on my cheap chinese k40 laser and i wasn't even using the upgrades then i was just using the manual knob to set power which is why half of them burned but i never even see them never use it and they still do the job so i'm all happy so the reason i cut individual little squares out and not just use one sheet of translucent white is because if you used one sheet the light would bleed into the other indicators so just say you had one indicator light up you would see the light bleeding around these ones as well so you sort of need individual black to stop it from bleeding out okay so here we are in the caution box you can see the layers that i've got um first thing i need to do is fix up the error which is right here you can see there's two left aileron tabs so i just need to quickly jump in here and change that one to an r all right all right so if i just quickly turn off the engraving that right there is what i'm going to cut now this panel is the one that needs to be replaced so i'm going to cut that out of three you can see that the yellow squares are a different power of cut so they are only lightly cut to mark the surface and to give you that grid and they also cut through the paper that's protecting it so it acts as a mask so when i paint the whole thing black these little yellow squares will still be paper so when i peel them off it'll be clear squares it'll make sense in a second so i'll jump over the laser now and i'll um show you how i do that all right so here we are in the lasercad software you can see that the yellow layer is a cut but it's at 150 speed and only 40 power so i don't want to cut through all the plastic i just want to cut through the mask on top of it uh and then the black layer is the actual cut that i want so that's really slow 12 speed and 60 power so it'll go the right way through the plastic so i'll just quickly download that throw the plastic in the laser actually well so what i'll do first is i'll just quickly drag this over to one side so i can save on plastic so when i lay my a4 sheet down i can probably cut two out of this one a4 sheet um so to minimize waste i'll just move that over there and then i'll download it and then we'll move over the laser okay so here we are at the laser and this is the plastic i'm using three millimeter um acrylic and it is transparent green in color so i'll just place this in about here just so it's right on the edge to save material and then if i just come over here and push the test button um it will just run the outline so you can make sure that it's going to fit on your material i think i'll probably get yeah i'll get two out of this if i need it just move it over just a slot [Music] all right so i'll close the lid and i'll let it run [Music] yeah with me while i try and clamp my phone so you can see with the lid closed [Laughter] [Laughter] so [Music] [Laughter] this oh so there we have it okay so here we are um fresh out of the laser you can see that i've just lightly engraved those squares and the reason i've done that is so when i peel this off you end up with that what i'm going to do now is paint the entire thing including the back okay so here it is all painted you can see that i've left the paper on there and painted the whole thing matte black before i did that i glued that top layer on uh the only purpose that serves is to give it a bit of depth i did that first so i didn't have to paint it and then worry about sticking this on top of paint it's better to glue them together and paint them all in one big go so the back of it's not engraved yet so all i'm going to do now is i can pull these stickers off now because i don't really need them but you can see that when you gently get that label there's there so you'll peel that off and that's just green plastic it looks black because the back of it's black obviously um so now i'll reverse engrave the text onto the back of this so when you turn it over you'll see the text so i don't need the yellow layer for this i'll delete that uh all i need is this section now all i'm going to do is mirror that because i'll be engraving from the rear like that and then i'll save that as a dxf and i'll open that in lasercad okay so you can see i've got it imported in the laser cad here first thing i need to do is change this cut layer so i want to just lightly mark on a piece of scrap mdf that's in the laser the outline in the hole so i can line the panel up and then i'm engraving the red layer at 250 speed 50 power which is what i always do so i'll just speed this up to say 200 and 30 and so all i'm going to do now is just quickly run that outside cut i'll down that i'll download that to the machine to score a piece of mdf that's in it all right so here we are over the machine i just remembered one thing i usually use a piece of scrap mdf in there and then i engrave lightly on the outside and i've got a place to put the panel for this one however i just remembered that because it's glued too glued together it's actually taller so i'm not using that mdf because otherwise the panel will be so far up that it won't be focused on the laser at the right height for cutting the um for engraving the text sorry so i'm just going to engrave that outline into some masking tape that i've laid on the bed um so i'll still get the lines of where it's supposed to be but it's a little to no height and i can still use those lines to mark it out so i'll just quickly turn on the air pump close the lid and fire up the laser and engrave that [Applause] way to line that up to where it's supposed to be i'll get that in the right position and i'll run the engraved profile all right so now that i've got the panel in the laser all i need to do is turn off the cut layer light up the engraved layer make sure that's set right 5250 x unilateralism yep download that into the machine and run it um so all right so she's all finished all i need to do now is just clean the back of that blast it with a bit of air to get the residue off and clear out all that and then peel off all those stickers you can already see the engine start cycle one there when it's backlit you can see it but when it's dark it's pretty hard to make out and there's the finished panel um you can see that i obviously reverse engraved it um and you can make out the lighting when it's backlit but when it's sort of flush against it and there's no light coming behind it it just looks black um so what i'll do now is i'll put that on get it back in the aircraft this panel will be getting an upgrade shortly being that i'm going to remove this fidgets led 64 because if i had my time again i wouldn't do this don't forget when this was one of the first things that i ever made and when i made this dcs bios didn't exist arduino wasn't really a thing there was no way to get it to communicate with dcs so fidgets was the only way i could drive so many leds with the pc um i've had nothing but dramas with it to tell you the truth uh for some reason that hates usb3 so i have to plug this one separately to my computer not in all the usb ports that are in my cockpit so there's one extra cable for this and the other problem is the newer version of helios the software which runs all my gauges and my cockpit and basically every switch in the cockpit no longer supports the fidgets card so i'm using a very very old version of helios not the current version um i'd much prefer to use the current version so what i'm going to do is rip that card out put a matrix in there an led matrix with a um what is it a seven six one two chip or whatever they are in an arduino so this will be run by dcs buyers shortly probably by the end of the year um and that will let me upgrade to the newer version of helios which comes with a whole bunch of other other benefits so watch out for that video when i pull this apart again replace that and i'll show you how i use it or the differences anyway so that's the completed project what i'm going to do now is just put it back in the aircraft and test it but i'm sure it will work because i haven't changed anything except that front cover and now i no longer have the left aileron tab typo i've got a right aileron tab there now anyway thanks heaps for watching um stay tuned there's more content coming i'm um planning some other videos and working on some other stuff right now thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: The Warthog Project

Views: 20,377

Rating: 4.995585 out of 5

Keywords: dcs, flight simulator, digital combat simulator, warthog, warthog project, the warthog project, a10 warthog, a10, a10c, brrrtttt, a10 simulator, dcs a10c, flight sim, flight simulator cockpit, diy flight simulator, diy, gaming, game

Id: reyfGvMXvuU

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2020