donbinator

Well I think I figured my "precision" settings out. :). I turned down this, turned up that, and ended up with a near perfect elec panel. I'll take a picture some other time but it turns out that there's a setting for the resolution of the scan, and it was set to 0.1mm. I set it to 0.05mm and it made a pretty significant difference. I'm stoked. You know what though? The smell from the laser cutting seems to be 80% from the actual panel after you remove it. That is, you can have the best fan in the world, but once you remove the panel and wave it around your house bragging to kids and wives who really don't care or even quite grasp what the heck it is you are spending all that time in the garage for, the entire house smells :(. Does washing them help?

Cool! Congrats! Nice work on scoring your own sim room :thumbup:

Ah!!! Thanks for that! I'll recalibrate based on 80% then. I should have thought to find out more about that. I fly RC aircraft and you rarely want to charge LiPo batteries at their rated charge rate if you want them to last, should have figured it would be the same kind of deal for the tube and its power supply.

Yeah I had seen you or someone post about that stuff. Looks interesting and I may do that. There's a plastics shop right by my work that cuts to size while you wait which I used for the first panel, but it was expensive (3 500x300mm sheets cost about $44 US :(. Convenient though :). What do I use to cut this stuff? I'm using shot acrylic (not extruded) and it seems kind of brittle. I have a small band saw, but haven't tried that yet. They use a table saw at the plastics show but I haven't had a chance to look at what teeth they are using.

The runtime for both cutting and engraving was about 3:26 for the top panel. I'm doing the cutting at 100% power (50W) at 20mm/sec and the engraving at 200mm/sec 20% power (I think, I'm not at home right now). I leave the paper on the bottom but obviously not the top as I spray painted it. I might reduce that a little since as Gremlin77 pointed out it's carving into the panel. I have no idea what my "precision settings" are. I'll have to go stare at the settings for a while to figure out the software and what I can change there. What do you mean by "firing the laser both ways"? Yes I usually hit "run" and leave the garage as well. The fumes mostly go outside but I can definitely smell it so obviously some of them are coming back in. Really doesn't smell much more than when i have carpet installed in my house though. I am trying to figure out a way to route the exaust to a dedicated hole in the wall and I'll definitely get a bigger fan.

Yeah I'll definitely get side tracked :). The fumes aren't so bad, but I have to wait a while for the fan to empty the fumes in the box before I open it (I route the hose outside). You can definitely still smell it no matter what, so I'm mostly keeping the kids out of the garage while dad plays :). While investigating router vs. laser I did come across some of those web sites, but haven't gone back to try anything yet. I'll get there once I get further along with the cockpit. I think it would be fun to cut projects for the kids. They are always asking for projects to do, I can just hand them a pile of plastic parts and say "here, figure out how this goes together" :).

Thanks I'll try that. To begin with a did 5 strips at different powers and 200mm/sec and ended up picking the one that looked the best, but you are right that it has engraved through the paint and into the plastic a bit.

BTW, when I said "did this today" what I meant to say was "plugged other peoples work into my laser thingy and out came this today". Thanks dimebug!!! I did have to suffer through the expected bad software and manual (or lack thereof). The manual for RDCAM 6 is pretty bad, and there's no in-software help. It's also quite particular about how you configure stuff. Overall not unhappy though. Y'all are right about the fan though, it's underpowered and my garage does indeed smell like a dead cat now. I think my 10 year old son described as "horrible dad-garage-thing going on".

Laser works! Well the laser thing works. Did this today. I'm using 1/8th inch for top and bottom and 1/4 inch for the lighting layer, but I'm having a heck of a time getting it to be green when lit (or at least as green as the TM throttle).

Ah OK, I'm not even sure mine has that feature. I think I just realized what you are pointing out though, if the water is still in the laser when it freezes...kind of like my boat when I had to buy a new engine for it :mad:. So...basically I have to make sure I "winterize" my laser :). Thanks for the tip. I bet I would have been caught by that at some point which would have really sucked.

By pressure instrument do you mean the pump? Our winters can have periods of cold so I'll keep that in mind, thanks! My pump is a simple water pump, I provide the bucket :). I was just going to use distilled water (I think that's the same as demineralized?). Do you have an actual chiller? Should I be worried about the water getting too warm? BTW it arrive this morning and is WAY bigger than I had expected. Not exactly sure where I'm going to put it :cry:.

Thanks for the info all. Noted about the fumes. Mine will be in the garage with the exaust pipe out the window. I'll see how that goes and if I need to I'll likely end up putting a bigger fan on as well. In terms of parts they do sell parts, but it's operated from China so...:).

I ordered one of these and will hopefully get it any day now. I'm a little worried because they haven't been able to give me a tracking number yet even through they claim to have shipped it from California last week... http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-CUTTING-ENGRAVER-50W-CO2-LASER-ENGRAVING-MACHINE-UP-DOWN-PLATFORM-f6-/230833149220?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item35beba5524 If anyone is interested I'll let you know what I think of it. It's cheap for what it is (DSP based 300mx500mm 50W) but I'm pretty handy with Windows, drivers, and software/hardware in general so I'm *hoping* I can figure this thing out :).

unmounted all parts please! Please make mine unmounted, I might need to do some work to it before mounting...thanks!

Yep, I'd like to order one if you are doing another run. Thanks!

Hey Gadroc, are you using the laser engraver you bought to cut and engrave or did you end up using your access to the CNC (at work?) to cut, then use the laser engraver to etch? I'm asking because I'm going BACK AND FORTH about whether to build/buy a rotary CNC or go ahead and deal with the cheap Chinese laser engraver (they are still selling them like crazy on ebay for about $900). After using yours what would you have done given 20/20 hindsight?

Yeah, I told my wife 15 years ago when we got married that I was going to get my pilots license. Turns out she has a phobia for flying (and thus me flying). I could put my foot down and say "i'm getting my pilots license" and she would say "ok" but instead I get a lot of mileage out of her not wanting me in a real airplane :). Gotta choose what's important and while I'd love to fly real airplanes it's just not important enough for me to put her through that :thumbup:. Besides, I'm pretty sure it will be awhile before any A-10's go to civilian market....

Wow deaconjb that looks pretty freakin' nice. You have a *nice* playable cockpit! Many start but don't get that far me thinks.

Hey has anyone besides that one guy in France tried for character recognition for the CMSP? I've been playing with Tesseract (open source OCR) and would like to create a learned font for the countermeasures display. I tried it with the default set and that...uh....didn't work so well :). Where the heck is that font anyways? The lua script calls for font_CMSP, but I don't know how to find the font. Anyone know where it lives?

Haha, not exactly what I was going for. The "wrinkle" is more like a buckle and makes the aluminum framing show a gap in the side. I'll post a pic later so you get a better idea of what I'm talking about. Doesn't look very realistic to me, but I'll go google the "wrinkles" in A-10s and see if I can find a photo of what you are talking about. BTW, I'm reading a book called "Warthog" by William Smallwood. I'm a little more than half way through the book and can now recommend it. It's not a GREAT book, but for an A-10 enthusiast it's definitely a good read. It's about the A-10 deployments in Iraq, the pilots, the missions and the shifts in role for the A-10s. One thing I hadn't really thought about is crossing the Oceans to get somewhere. Can you imagine 10 hours of flying in formation through bad weather without autopilot or radar??? I can't even think how they worked the cramp out of their hands at the other side!

I think they use it for curved wall surfaces for things like food display counters at commercial stores. I'm not really sure though.

By the way, I highly recommend Parkland Plastics Plas-Tex Waterproof Wall Panels for skinning. It's tough, flexible, paintable with latex paint (I used Gull Gray), you can drill it, you can glue it, you can nail through it, and it doesn't split. Oh, and you can cut it with a decent pair of scissors or hobby knife. Its drawbacks are that it is perhaps a little too flexible. It buckled a little on the right side of my cockpit where the shape of the ribs "wrinkled" it a bit, but if you are careful you can prevent this from happening (live and learn :)).

OK I've been lurking far too long and distracting y2kiah and others with my own issues, so I'm starting my own build thread. I'm committed enough to feel comfortable with that. I've put off making wine this year (one of my many hobbies) to build an A-10C cockpit for DCS, which by the way is in my opinion the best combat flight simulator ever made (at least for me). I hope they are making money as it really isn't much for the arcade XBox Playstation etc. crowd. Cheers to Eagle Dynamics for taking a risk on us. I'm about to purchase another license of A-10C for the PC I'm building for my cockpit. I'd also like to point out that without y2kiah, Linden, Gadroc, and many others, my cockpit would either look like a generic sim cockpit, or would have taken me about 8 months to get to where I am now, whereas with the community (folks mentioned above among them) it's taken 2 so far. My philosophy is that while I'd like to get flying as soon as possible, my cockpit will serve as an outlet for my electronics/firmware/CAD/building-stuff needs. I am always starting projects because I have an inherant need to build. When work has me bogged down with paperwork, I can come home and create. For this reason I'll copy some people's work (such as the frame of the pit), but not other parts which interest me to build (such as the panels, the underlying scripts, and the electronics). Anyways, here are a couple of photos I just snapped of the frame so far.

Hey instead of hijacking this thread I'm going to start my own so I don't clutter yours up with stuff related to my build. BTW I know many have said this already, but very nice work on the drawings. I've assembed the center, left, and right sections already and everything fits together perfectly. I truly appreciate the work and would like to know if you accept donations? PM me with your paypal account... Look for my thread coming soon and thanks again for your help!

y2kiah, how are you doing it? Are you using a little display? I apologize if you've already posted this but I didn't see how you are planning to implement the display of the CMSP. Has anyone put a request into the folks at DCS for LUA implementation of the display text?