I walked into my apartment after work and tripped over a small box. That could only mean one thing... My controls have arrived!



I took that as a sign from the zerg overmind that it was time to start constructing the control panel. Having made my paper template, I knew the button positioning I laid out was very good. I picked up a large sheet of .5 inch MDF (medium density fiberboard) at Home Depot and began plotting the holes. The difficult part of this task was fitting the joystick. The joystick can only be set behind a maximum of .5 inches of material. Because I am going to cover the MDF with a layer of .25 inch plexiglass, I needed to use a router to create a .25 inch recess so the overall material thickness between the joystick baseplate and the handle remains .5 inches.



This joystick recess also creates a new problem. With the recess in the MDF, there is now only .25 inches of drillable material to screw the joystick in. Faced with this, I decided to make a second panel and use this first control panel as a test run for various screws of different widths and threadings. Once I know the appropriate hardware, I can then make the second panel correctly and take into consideration a few of the small things I learned from making the first one.