F-16 ICP Mechanical Design Fully Prototyped!

The ICP's mechanical design is now fully prototyped.

That is...

1.  Everything you see in the picture is 3D modeled, 3D printed... Hot off the press, just file off the flashing/support materials... and assemble. No lengthy filing required.
2. All the graphics is turned off when exporting... so 3D printed without graphics. Then, laser engraved. It's possible that you can use resin printers and print with the graphics with good result, but I am testing the worse case scenario, printing with filament printers.
3. All buttons are backed with 0.9kgf stainless dome switches, resulting in very satisfying click, just like the real thing.
4. The Dobber is backed with an off-the-shelf 5-way "joystick" I found and shared on ViperPits before. I am too lazy to do optical on this one... no need anyway.
5. The toggle switches are commercial grade miniature toggles... not the Mil spec. one that costs USD $180 apiece. It's not cheap, about USD $10 apiece + S/H + tax. Not easy to find... and very few stock (I bought all they had from Mouser US; and I am not sorry about it). Re-stocking/back-ordering time would be something like 28 days, not too bad really.
6. They are multi-color prints (easy if you have the right printer/slicer). And the engraving white graphics is hand painted.
7. The analog wheels are completely self-contained, just like the real thing. Each contains a Hall Effect Sensor/PCB, magnet, mechanical stop, etc. 3-wires in/out, that's it. I am still waiting for OshPark to deliver the thin PCB I ordered for the hall sensor, MLX90316.
8. The main PCB is still to be designed... I couldn't start designing it until I got the whole mechanical design fixed, otherwise I wouldn't know how to route the traces to avoid the screws. I actually just moved two screws around to accommodate the analog wheel supports (the real thing has a bend aluminum back plate to form tabs for attaching the wheels, but I decided to 3D print them, hence had to thicken the support to avoid the tabs from delaminating. Thus I need more space behind them, and the screws were too close.
9. The frame outside is printed directly from the F-16 HUD I published years ago, following the natural split line the original has... No modification, except.... I had to file the screw tab a bit to avoid the collision with the rotation of the analog wheels. The screw tabs on the frame is not exactly the original dimension anyway (the screw hole locations are)... I BS'd the tabs anyway. Just a little love tap from a file to round off the corners... that's it. 30 seconds. Nothing serious. This is the "biggest" filing I had to do with this design.
10. The surface of the main panel... that's ironed... I had to adjust the ironing parameters of the Bambu Studio. That's straight out of the 3D printer, no sanding, no filing! It's not 100% flat, and there are still a bit of streaks/gaps on the surface from the ironing. And those gaps cause some problems with white residue streaks in those gaps when filling the graphics... a simple coat of Satin Acrylic Varnish before doing the white graphics solves the problem.
11. And all the pretty results are really printed with a .4 E3D Obsidian High Flow nozzle, nothing exotic! (I still have to turn up the volume flow rate to take advantage of the "high flow", so I am just using it as a .4 hardened nozzle at the moment).

Put next the the real thing... I don't think they did better! Of course, all this is for VR... completely unnecessary... I do it, just because I can.

Of course, this is not backlighted. It can easily be modified for milling/cutting out the front panel with Acrylic, and then you'd have to re-design a PCB with LED backlights (NOT my problem!). The whole point of this thing is to demonstrate that high quality non-backlighted panel manufacturing is possible with just a 3D printer, and a laser engraver, in the garage.