front panel

19 Articles

Deep Dive On Panel Making

April 27, 2025 by 23 Comments

It is easier than ever to produce projects with nice enclosures thanks to 3D printing and laser cutting. However, for a polished look, you also need a labeled front panel. We’ve looked at several methods for doing that in the past, but we enjoyed [Accidental Science’s] video showing his method for making laminated panels.

His first step is to draw the panel in Inkscape, and he has some interesting tips for getting the most out of the program. He makes a few prints and laminates one of them. The other is a drill guide. You use the drill guide to make openings in the panel, which could be aluminum, steel, plastic, or whatever material you want to work in.

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Blinkenlights-First Retrocomputer Design

January 11, 2025 by 10 Comments

[Boz] wants to build a retrocomputer, but where to start? You could start with the computery bits, like say the CPU or the bus architecture, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, [Boz] built a righteous blinkenlights array.

What’s cool about this display is that it’s ready to go out of the box. All of the LEDs are reverse-mount and assembled by the board maker. The 19″ 2U PCBs serve as the front plates, so [Boz] was careful not to use any through-hole parts, which also simplified the PCB assembly, of course. Each slice has its own microcontroller and a few shift registers to get the bits lit up, and that’s all there is to it. They take incoming data at 9600 baud and output blinkiness.

Right now it pulls out its bytes from his NAS. We’re not sure which bytes, and we think we see some counters in there. Anyway, it doesn’t matter because it’s so pretty. And maybe someday the prettiness will lure [Boz] into building a retrocomputer to go under it. But honestly, we’d just relax and watch the blinking lights.

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Ask Hackaday: How Do You Make Front Panels?

June 20, 2024 by 49 Comments

We’ll admit it. The closer a project is to completion, the less enthusiasm we have for it. Once the main design is clearly going to work on a breadboard, we’re ready to move on to the next one. We don’t mind the PCB layout, especially with modern tools. However, once the board is done, you have to do the case. Paradoxically, this was easier in the old days because you just picked some stock box, drilled some holes, and while it looked terrible, it was relatively easy.

Today, the bar is much higher. You’ll probably 3D print or laser cut an enclosure. If it looks no better than what you did in the 1970s, you won’t win many admirers. We routinely cover projects that could easily pass for commercial products. So how do you do it?

The Parts

The enclosure may even be the easy part. There are plenty of scripts and generators that will make you a nice box that meets your specifications. You can probably even get the holes made as you build. Back in the day, it was a challenge to cut odd-shaped holes for things like serial port connectors. Now, no problem. The printer or laser will just make a hole with any shape you like. You may even want to try a new angle on 3D printing.

Mounting the PCB isn’t that hard, either. With 3D printing, you can create standoffs, but even if you laser cut, you can easily use conventional standoffs. In a pinch, we’ve used long bolts with nuts.

The real problem, it seems to us, is the front panel. Only Star Trek can get away with front panels containing a bunch of knobs and dials with no markings. And although we call them “front” panels, sometimes you need markings on the back or even the sides, too. Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: How Do You Make Front Panels?” →

The scope, with new knobs and stickers on it, front panel renovated

Explosion-Scarred Scope Gets Plastic Surgery Hackerspace Style

January 2, 2024 by 9 Comments

Some equipment comes with a backstory so impressive, you can’t help but treat it with reverence. For instance, this Hantek scope’s front panel and knobs have melted when a battery pack went up in flames right next to it. Then, it got donated to the CADR hackerspace, who have in turn given us a scope front panel refurbishing master class (translated, original), demonstrating just how well a typical hackerspace is prepared for performing plastic surgery like this.

All of the tools they used are commonplace hackerspace stuff, and if you ever wanted to learn about a workflow for repairs like these, their wiki post is a model example, described from start to end. They show how they could use a lasercutter to iterate through figuring out mechanical dimensions of the labels, cutting the silhouette out of cardboard as they tweaked the offsets. Then, they designed and printed out the new front panel stickers, putting them through a generic laminator to make them last. An FDM printer helped with encoder and button knob test fits, with the final version knobs made using a resin printer.

Everything is open-source – FreeCAD knob designs, SVG stickers, and their CorelDraw sources are linked in the post. With the open-source nature, there’s plenty of room to improvement – for instance, you can easily put these SVGs through KiCad and then adorn your scope with panels made out of PCBs! With this visual overhaul, the Hantek DSO5102P in question has gained a whole lot more character. It’s a comprehensive build, and it’s just one of the many ways you can compensate for a damaged or missing shell – check out our comprehensive DIY shell guide to learn more, and when you get to designing the front panel, we’ve highlighted a few lessons on that too.

Your Home Mainframe

December 28, 2023 by 36 Comments

We miss the days when computers looked like computers. You know, blinking lights, rows of switches, and cryptic displays. [Phil Tipping] must miss those days too since he built PlasMa, a “mini-mainframe simulator.”

The device would look at home on the set of any old science fiction movie. Externally, it has 540 LEDs, 100 switches, and a number of other I/O devices, including a keypad and an LCD screen. Internally, it can support three different instruction sets. Everything is run by an ATmega2560, and it has simulated paper tape, magnetic tape, and disks (all via SD cards). The magnetic tapes also have LED simulated reels to show the tape position and other status information (the round displays just above the LCD display).

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This CRT-Style Pi Portable Gets All The Details Right

February 12, 2023 by 12 Comments

A quick glance at the “Pi Terminal” built by [Salim Benbouziyane], and you might think he pulled an old CRT monitor out of a video editing bay and gutted it. Which, of course, is the point. But what you’re actually looking at is a completely new construction, featuring a fully 3D printed enclosure, a clever PCB control panel, and some very slick internal engineering.

[Salim] started the design by recreating the principle components of the build, namely the 8 inch 4:3 IPS LCD panel and Raspberry Pi 4, digitally in CAD. This let him design the enclosure around the parts, rather than trying to cram everything in after the fact. After printing the case, which clearly took considerable inspiration from broadcast video monitors of the early 2000s, he then painstakingly post-processed the parts using tips and techniques picked up from prop builders. To really finish things off, he designed his control panel as a PCB so he could have it professionally fabricated, and used heat set inserts to hold everything tight. Continue reading “This CRT-Style Pi Portable Gets All The Details Right” →

Improve Your Front Panels

January 15, 2022 by 58 Comments

For many of us, the bane of electronic projects is making a professional-looking enclosure. Sure, 3D printing has made it easier to make the actual enclosure, but there’s still the problem of labeling it. [Richard Langner] has the answer with something he calls easy front panels. You can read about it or watch the tutorial video below.

The concept is easy enough. You create your beautiful artwork in your choice of graphics programs. The example uses Inkscape, but you could do it in anything, even PowerPoint. You print it out and cut it to size. You could, of course, print it in color or — as the example does — color it in by hand.

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