Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Making Fun: Mission Control Desk”.
With the start of school, my son needed a homework desk. I wanted to build him a great one, so I included an extra feature then my homework for the desk side. That shows three quarter inch. India, a few bits of oak here and there hold everything together.
It’S rather straightforward desk with a slanted top. The top is made of MDF too and hinges up on a piano hinge to reveal a compartment for the mission control panel. I rounded the edges and sanded then painted it all white but use the magnetic primer on the inside of the lid.
So magnets will stick to it to fill the hidden compartment. I’M a control panels out of a pinch, masonite drilled holes in the corners and glued templates. I created in a CAD program onto the backs. I drilled a whole bunch of holes, cut out a whole bunch of slots.
I Prime the panel’s sanded them then painted them gray. I printed labels on inkjet, transparencies and glued them to the panel’s trimming. The holes and edges populated all the panels with rocker switches, toggle switches, illuminated, push-button switches, rotary and linear, potentiometers LEDs bar graph LEDs and seven-segment leds. I mounted the panels onto a frame of one by two screwing them in with number six screws and finish washers for a technical look.
I modified the illuminated push buttons to hold larger LEDs and made labels for them with inkjet transparencies for my status indicator panels. I made LED holders out of aluminum, I cut dividers from Plexiglas and naasson dividers with dremel, so they would slot together for reflective tape on the dividers and mounted them under a diffuser. I made from a cutting board an Arduino will read inputs and command LEDs. Cooperating with a Raspberry Pi that will play sounds in Himmel gameplay.
I used five LED matrix drivers control the LEDs allowing control of up to six hundred and forty LEDs. I use four IO expanders to register all the switch changes and button presses. There was a lot of soldering involves connecting everything together.
It took a few spreadsheets to keep track of all the connections. The big panel of panel slips into the compartment of the desk. I found a self-adhesive world map just the right size for our mission control console to reflect the position of the spacecraft in orbit. I hacked a fridge magnet into the shape of the CSM and LV. An iPad will serve as an extra data display and play a curated set of space-related videos.
This velcro, lined aluminum channel, will hold it in place. It’S play time. I made a few checklists for my flight director to go through final. Go guidance.
Go sir, you go all stations go for a woman ship. The sequence panel controls sound bytes from NASA representing the major events throughout a mission. Some panels are good for fiddling like adjusting the variables on this aecom panel or testing the lamps on the status panels. The attitude insurgent panels just give random numbers within certain ranges, since we don’t yet have a spacecraft or astronaut to track the panel mark control operates a few of the imaginary space phasma campus, I programmed a secret trigger for a simulated. Lightning strike has happened to Apollo 12. I program the same solution.
They use switching SCE to aux over using the Rockets on the spacecraft across trouble. So I count button presses and trigger appropriate alarms. Expect our booster panel to get a lot of overuse. I love covered switches, move delighted to learn that the Apollo spacecraft, using the control, various pyrotechnic deployments and separations, though the cryogenics panel, is mostly just a sounded like show. I also programmed in a widely known mishap. Please steady, crying playtime is over.
The console was shut down with the abort panel mission aborted powering down the thing that our mission control console is most missing is a spacecraft to monitor and control. Don’T worry, though, I have plans for that as well. .