Central glare shield

The central glare is most "interesting" to the flight deck builder because it requires many "non-standard" electronic items. These include the LCD displays on the FCU and the EFIS control panels (white-on-black seven-segment displays, not angled, character height about 7.5mm) and the dials (rotary encoders with 32 detents and momentary push-pull action, some with concentric rotary switch). Here is the breakdown of what solution I have found for these.

Display units

All home flightdeck projects I know use LED displays for the FCU and barometer, which has two major drawbacks in my opinion: colour (the digits are not white) and geometry (the size, tilt angle, and digit spacing just aren't quite right). Therefore I decided to use matrix LCDs in this place. There is a 180x32 pixel graphics display module which uses white digits on a blue background, its size is such that four of these will cover everything except the barometer displays (left EFIS -- spd/hdg -- alt/vs -- right EFIS). I'm considering the use of miniature 128x64 pixel displays for the barometer windows. This way, I can imitate the digits and other indicators very accurately, the only deviation from the original would be the blue background colour on the FCU displays, which I can certainly live with.

Dials

The dials require a bit of work. Fortunately, I found some Panasonic encoders at a German surplus company, they happen to have 32 nice and stiff detents, just like on the real aircraft. They even come with a pushbutton, but I'll have to come up with a way of adding a pull action as well. Also, three of the six dials will need a concentric switch as well, I haven't decided on the design yet. Watch this space.