annunciator lights

[Guest PoRrEkE]

Hi guys.Between all the time I spend for school projects this year and the student-club activities I find some time now & then to do some work for the sim.As posted in a thread before I made a hardware electronic cirquit for the gear-leds. Now that is working great & perfect, I am looking for a new way to make the annunciator capsules to put the leds in.I searched the topics here and I found 2 things:hot-glue & extruded plastics.First off I will work with a printed paper with black background & white letters. As tests show this works great. Then I bought car window shader foil. Using 2 layers of that works fine as well.Now either I need to find extruded plastic shapes and make the housings or I need to find a way to cut plexi to pieces of 10mm*26mm to make them the right size. I can't find a good way though to cut the plexi so that the result comes out clean. Maybe it would be a good idea (just thought of it) to use less thik plexi .. maybe use some plastic from CD boxes ?Hmmmz .. I might just have found my sollution by tiping this topic :-lolNone the less .. here is what they should look like .. so I think I better use extruded none the less ..http://users.skynet.be/plipke/annunciators.jpgonly question is: where will I find that :s

[Guest Erups]

For 2$ each, i think that FDS annunciators are well worth the money :)I doubt i can come up with an equal (let alone better) reproduction for 2$ a piece or less...Let's say i am sure i can't :)

[Guest deltaflight]

I could'nt agree more. FDS's annunciators, among other items, are very realistic and well worth it. Here ( http://www.avsim.com/project757/pics/transition5.html ) you can see our sim and every annunciator you see in the photographs were made by FDS according to our specs.and this link ( http://www.flightdecksolutions.com/list_pr...b637be6f69eb603 ) will take you to FDS's annunciator page. Scroll down to K-Series annunciators.Take care,Michael Lehkamp

[Guest PoRrEkE]

Hmmz .. that sounds like a wounderfull sollution indeed.An e-mail is already underway to Peter.Hope he can provide me with the right size of housings and wants to sell me those without the engraved plates for a good price because I prefer using my own made legends anyway.Hmmz.. makes me think of something else I could ask for.

[Guest Erups]

Oh well!Last time i checked it was 2$ a piece...Inflation running faster then in italy????Can't believe it :(

[Guest PoRrEkE]

turns out i would need 81 of them .. if i count my overhead as well.that brings total with 2 euro up to 162 ! :sthat's quite mutch.even i am not counting shipment + taxes + .. ?

[Guest Erups]

Yes, it's a huge amount...I know.And i'm not involved with PCos, but how would you make them?I don't know anything about plastic casting, and even if i knew, i would not have the master mould...If you are willing to try, well... good luck my friend :)I've just ordered the guides and rails for my cnc machine, once i have it up and running, i make you knobs, and you make me casts ;)

[Guest PoRrEkE]

casts .. is that what they are called ?ok well how I would make them ...first find a plastic tube (not round but rectangular) and just cut pieces of that. ready to use.only I would need to find correct sized rectangular tube .. which seams like very much fortunate if I would find them.or maybe i could use PVC plate and cut it 45

[Guest simbuff]

Hey Philip,one of the solutions I used is to buy some tic-tac sweets. The bottom of the box is exactly the extruded shape of an annunciator light. They exist in white, orange and blue. Maybe that's a cheap solution.regards

[Guest PoRrEkE]

Hey thnx! I'll try to find one of those and measure it.That's the kind of sollutions that I am looking fore :)

[Guest MattOlieman]

Mark, tic-tac box...... I LOVE IT!!!! Fantastic....

[Guest Erups]

Are you talking about the Mints?http://www.tic-tac.it/?If so i think they are too small.A typical annunciator is about 2.5cm by 1cm.

[Guest PoRrEkE]

Too small ?I got one here and the tic-tac is 13mm by 36mmWhich is 10mm to wide. The height is neglectable.Real shame though cuz they have such good shape for converting to annucniators!I will try none the less to see if maybe I can do something with them for my overhead. That should work.If you got a panel 180mm by 12mm or so and you have to put 3 annunciators in it, this tic-tac box is perfect. But if you have to make (for the emergency annunciators panel) a matrix of .. say 24 of those boxes (3*8) .. the matrix will be 3cm to wide and 2.4 to high. The high difference again is neglectable and can be solved by using a (3*7) or (3*6) matrix. That should work. But doing (2*7) would look wrong I think. Either way I can try.I guess I will be eating quite a lot of tictacs then :DOr maybe I can ask for sponsoring of boxes and then put the tictac logo on the outside of my shell :-lol

[Guest PoRrEkE]

Ow .. maybe if you cut them trough real carefull and clean .. you can take 1 cm out in the middle and glue back together .. that should work.Super!Simbuf Mark > THNX a milion for this great idea !!(i'll put it on the wiki as soon as I got pictures of a prototype.)

[Guest mbessler]

>Simbuf Mark > THNX a milion for this great idea !!>> ( i'll put it on the wiki as soon as I got pictures of a>prototype.)Good thinking :-) :)