We recently customised a B200 Captain Left Panel for a customer, as the layout they required was different to the standard King Air sub-panels that we sell via our website. We'll be adding this new configuration to our product range shortly.
This panel was backlit with warm-white LEDs to mimic the appearance of incandescent bulbs, and if you look closely in the second photograph, you can see what the backlighting looks beneath the fluorescent lights in our workshop, and in the third photo, with no backlighting on at all.
Below are a few quick shots that show the left-hand sub-panel from a much larger custom job that we're currently working on for one of our customers.
As we're doing the majority of the interfacing here in our workshop prior to shipping the whole constructed unit to him, we've integrated a custom backlighting panel which also doubles as a backing plate for all of the hardware. Doing this means that the whole panel now becomes an entirely separate module that can be easily removed as one piece, allowing us to do the wiring and testing away from the main instrument panel itself if need be.
Late last week we completed the first installation of our new RMC710 Autopilot System into a local customer's King Air C90 simulator that we've been helping with. The post previous to this one explained most of the panel's details but we've now uploaded a short video of it operating to our YouTube channel as well.
Throughout this build we've customised a few components here and there and thought that this might be a good opportunity to share some of them, seeing as the astute amongst you will no doubt have noticed some differences to previous builds we've been involved with.
One of the most immediately noticeable differences is the colour scheme, which is a medium grey colour. This is probably illustrated by the following panels, as photographed whilst still in our workshop.
Actually (and if you've watched the above video, rather obviously), the above MIPs were made for a previous customer and incorporated the addition of two small Marker Beacon Indicators, each positioned at the top left of their respective panels. A more detailed photograph of one of these is below, although because of the amount of light in our workshop - and no available tripod upon which to mount the camera - it's a little difficult to see the illumination that we'd temporarily hooked up behind the blue legend. In person as it were, however, we were very pleased with the result.
Okay then, back to our local customer's simulator ...
Below, you can see the two display units that had previously been purchased from another supplier and which were to be incorporated into the new build. We designed the main instrument panel around these and then the real work began: re-working the interfacing of the MFD and the PFD - although that's another post entirely if we ever find the hours needed to detail it. You can probably tell from the subsequent photos how involved the process was ... !
Oh, and skipping to the once again operational MFD and PFD ...
We don't offer a lot of 737 products as there are already plenty of quality manufacturers in this market and there's not really much else that we could normally offer over and above what's already available. Recently, however, we've been working with a customer who has specific space limitations and therefore custom measurements are required to properly house the panels in their rightful places.
After much testing and verification in our workshop to prove the possibilities, the panel will be used by our customer with his PMDG 737-800 NGX software via one of our 64 Input Boards for the switches, and a Conditional 64 Output Board to drive the LEDs in the annunciators.
And so this is the Boeing 737 N1 SET / SPD REF / AUTO BRAKE Panel that we dispatched to him a couple of weeks back, complete with our newly developed backlighting process. We haven't implemented this backlighting technique across our entire product range at the moment, as due to time restraints - and getting work out to customers - its become more of a panel by panel expansion (I guess that would be the best way to describe it!) ...
Alongside the panel itself, we also made the functioning combination switches which include a rotary switch, and an encoder (with pushbutton also if required). As you can tell from the positioning of the text, we've actually used some 30 degree rotaries as the 45 degree switches we had access to weren't able to be readily altered for the purposes required.
As a one-off type of project, a small section of vero board has been used to mount the small MFD switches, which isn't perhaps very pretty but gets the job done all the same! The photo below shows the panel about 80% wired.
A notable couple of omissions on this panel are obviously the two annunciators that accompany it, because we had already built these previously for our customer, so we simply built the rest of the panel around these measurements and the overall dimension constraints for the panel that were originally provided to us. The dual concentric knobs are designed and manufactured by us as well.
We've also improved our engraving technique lately as well, which is hopefully demonstrated by the picture above. It takes a little longer to accomplish, but the results are certainly worth it ...
