F-16 ICP Panel 2-tone Print

The mode buttons use two-tone printing. Basically, the faces are printed with black filament, the bodies are printed with grey filament. Then, the 6 buttons are then engraved with a 40W diode laser to cut through the black (unnecessary, but because I could).

I am getting a hang of the alignment. The mode button engraving is perfectly aligned with all 6 of them engraved in one shot. A jig, a previous print with some minor errors, is used to align and stood up the mode buttons. 

Again, this panel is intended to be used in VR, thus no point of engraving at all. But I could, so I did. It just looks good.

Again, the PCB still needs to be designed and made. Thus, there is a 1.6mm 3D printed yellow stand in for this assembly test. All the buttons are printed with PLA, laser engraved, and nothing is done to them other than peeling them off the support print, and filing off the stubborn flashings. No filing, no sanding... they all worked just as-is. That is, just print, peel off, assemble, and they all worked (if you don't want laser engraving).

Eventually, I might test SLS printing with services like Shapeways, with engraving turned on. Yes... engravings can be turned on/off, so are there provision in the Solidworks file to allow engravings sketches to be exported as DXF for laser engravers (my XTool S1 imports DXF directly as vector images).

Of course, I still need to white fill the letters and graphics.





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