The brand new control panel (seen above) incorperates the new power controller which has been under development for the past few months. It's now been integrated into the front panel and nearly all switches are functioning as intended (there are some spare switches which are still open). The board works like a charm and makes troubleshooting and development orders of magnitude easier. Despite being designed in a much less than optimal way, the board is proving to be robust and functional so far. There are plans for a new 4U control panel to be made with better ergonomics, indications and switch logic but that is a task for later this year.

There remains a few minor things needed on the power rack still, including swapping the low voltage regulators with more robust DIN rail units, connecting the battery bus to the aux bus bar and building the new front panel. Those are all pretty minor at this point and can be done whenever. Besides that the power rack is considered complete and sets the foundation for us to build out the rest of the cockpit. Next on my to-do list is prototyping the audio interface cards, now named OASIS cards (Old-school Audio Signal Interfacing and Switching). Parts have been ordered and testing has begun to hopefully have a test ready prototype by the end of the month. In addition I have some side projects to reverse engineer the ARINC 429 fuel gauges and current-sensing CSD oil temp gauges. Life is getting busy as the summer nears but I hope to continue making slow and steady progress on these projects over the coming weeks.