A baby’s creativeness is actually unbelievable. A yard can change into an unique jungle, a plastic grocery bag a parachute, or a stick a sword. However whereas youngsters can flip something into a chance for play, they’re particularly drawn to toys that simulate gadgets or actions that solely the adults can entry. That may very well be something from a toy smartphone to a toy lawnmower. When Jon Petter Skagmo was a child, he dreamed of area. Now as grownup with electronics expertise and a wholesome funds, he gave his daughter that have with this DIY spaceship simulator management panel.
Skagmo has a small nook in his dwelling beneath a staircase and needed to show it right into a play space for his daughter. It’s a tight area, however good for replicating the cramped quarters of a spaceship. This management panel lets Skagmo’s daughter really feel like she’s really controlling the ship and her creativeness can fill in the remainder.
It does genuinely appear like one thing you’d see on a bulkhead in an area shuttle. There are industrial-looking buttons, LED indicators, digital readouts, a management joystick, a navigation display, a speaker, and even gasoline degree gauges. That every one matches in a 3U rack type issue for simple mounting.
Skagmo drew the faceplate design in QCAD after which milled it from a sheet of two.5mm aluminum on a Shapeoko 3 CNC machine. Contained in the enclosure, which is split into smaller rack slots, are a handful of customized PCBs populated with the elements for every of the management panel’s subsystems. The seven-segment shows, for instance, all mount to 1 PCB, every LED bar mounts to its personal PCB, and the joystick connects to a different PCB.
A Raspberry Pi connects to every subsystem by the GPIO, receiving management inputs and setting the outputs. Skagmo selected a single-board laptop over a microcontroller in order that it might drive the primary navigation LCD. A Python script handles all the performance and Skagmo programmed particular routines, like a launch sequence that goes by the totally different rocket booster levels.
We don’t know Skagmo’s daughter’s age, however we really feel assured that this spaceship management panel would excite a toddler of any age — and even most adults. And since it mounts onto a typical rack, Skagmo can increase the spaceship simulation sooner or later to incorporate extra programs.