Front Panel Designer - Free

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seaton
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Front Panel Designer - Free

Post by seaton » Tue Jul 31, 2018 3:29 pm

I re-stumbled across this free download from https://www.frontpanelexpress.com/downloads/front_panel_designer which is used to create cutout panels for projects.

Suitible for PC, Mac and Linux.

Best thing is its free!!!!

....however....

It's designed for their service which is getting your design panels orders placed directly within this software.....however you can export into a number fo different formats (DXF, SVG + PDF) that can be directly imported into your Laser/ CNC software

I've found it relatively easy to use and define my custom cutouts and then save these as macro object to be re-used at a later time.

What can it do?

It has a number of predefined cutout, i.e. fans, DB9, DB25, knobs etc

You can create your front panel by placing the cutouts on the material and even get a 3D representation, it will even place the reference point that can be exported as part of you DFX, this is very useful for CNC

2018-07-31_15-25-22.png
2018-07-31_15-25-22.png (397.9 KiB) Viewed 12744 times


when finished export to DXF and import (in this example) to Light burn

2018-07-31_15-26-42.png
2018-07-31_15-26-42.png (264.51 KiB) Viewed 12744 times


You can also create custom parts that can be saved under user settings - Called macro objects

2018-07-31_15-42-20.png
2018-07-31_15-42-20.png (176.81 KiB) Viewed 12743 times


I'm just going to play around now with printing to see if I can use as a template that I can use on my laser cutter to cut and drill out for my panel meter.

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seaton
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Re: Front Panel Designer - Free

Post by seaton » Tue Jul 31, 2018 5:17 pm

Further to this...

Printing allows you to print out a panel to be used as a template for cutting, along with centre holes for drilling, so next thing will be for me to use this to cut out a place on my laser cutters panel using this template for the amp meter.

I checked the printed copy and all appears to be spot on in terms of measurements

2018-07-31_17-11-04.png
2018-07-31_17-11-04.png (42.89 KiB) Viewed 12741 times

parkview
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Re: Front Panel Designer - Free

Post by parkview » Tue Jul 31, 2018 8:47 pm

Nice find - I have it downloaded!

DJCoopes
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Re: Front Panel Designer - Free

Post by DJCoopes » Tue Aug 07, 2018 12:43 pm

Can it export to a .skp .dae or .stl ?
10 poke 53281,0
20 poke 646,5
30 poke 53280,0
40 poke 647,0
50 print " **** commodore 64 basic v3 ****"
60 print " "
70 print " 64k ram system 38911 basic bytes free"
80 print " "
90 print "ready."

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seaton
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Re: Front Panel Designer - Free

Post by seaton » Tue Aug 07, 2018 6:41 pm

DJCoopes wrote:Can it export to a .skp .dae or .stl ?


No, however it does export STEP so can then use something else to convert STEP to those formats

https://www.schaeffer-ag.de/en/front_panel_designer/the_idea/

The link to the german site (above) has a newer version than the US site, which included the STEP output

DJCoopes
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Re: Front Panel Designer - Free

Post by DJCoopes » Thu Aug 09, 2018 11:54 am

Thanks! This should make my design time quicker, as i used to have to manually create elements such as fan holes, etc... in sketchup and then scale them through 123d design.
10 poke 53281,0
20 poke 646,5
30 poke 53280,0
40 poke 647,0
50 print " **** commodore 64 basic v3 ****"
60 print " "
70 print " 64k ram system 38911 basic bytes free"
80 print " "
90 print "ready."

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