This DIY Spaceship Control Panel Lets a Child Explore the Cosmos
Jon Petter Skagmo dreamed of space as a kid and so he gave his daughter that experience with this DIY spaceship simulator control panel.
A child’s imagination is truly incredible. A backyard can become an exotic jungle, a plastic grocery bag a parachute, or a stick a sword. But while kids can turn anything into an opportunity for play, they’re especially drawn to toys that simulate devices or activities that only the adults can access. That could be anything from a toy smartphone to a toy lawnmower. When Jon Petter Skagmo was a kid, he dreamed of space. Now as adult with electronics skills and a healthy budget, he gave his daughter that experience with this DIY spaceship simulator control panel.
Skagmo has a small nook in his home under a staircase and wanted to turn it into a play area for his daughter. It is a tight space, but perfect for replicating the cramped quarters of a spaceship. This control panel lets Skagmo’s daughter feel like she’s actually controlling the ship and her imagination can fill in the rest.
It does genuinely look like something you’d see on a bulkhead in a space shuttle. There are industrial-looking buttons, LED indicators, digital readouts, a control joystick, a navigation screen, a speaker, and even fuel level gauges. That all fits in a 3U rack form factor for easy mounting.
Skagmo drew the faceplate design in QCAD and then milled it from a sheet of 2.5mm aluminum on a Shapeoko 3 CNC machine. Inside the enclosure, which is divided into smaller rack slots, are a handful of custom PCBs populated with the components for each of the control panel’s subsystems. The seven-segment displays, for example, all mount to one PCB, each LED bar mounts to its own PCB, and the joystick connects to another PCB.
A Raspberry Pi connects to each subsystem through the GPIO, receiving control inputs and setting the outputs. Skagmo chose a single-board computer over a microcontroller so that it could drive the main navigation LCD. A Python script handles all of the functionality and Skagmo programmed specific routines, like a launch sequence that goes through the different rocket booster stages.
We don’t know Skagmo’s daughter’s age, but we feel confident that this spaceship control panel would excite a child of any age — and even most adults. And because it mounts onto a standard rack, Skagmo can expand the spaceship simulation in the future to include additional systems.