Instrument Panel Design with Inkscape

Designing an instrument panel doesn't have to be hard, and yet you see lots of hackish methods to do it, and many firms charging real money just to use a simple panel builder. If you're like me, and you want a better way, try what I did. The results are impressive (click the image for a larger view):

Inkscape

Inkscape is a vector drawing program, like CorelDraw, Illustrator, or many other tools, but easy to use and completely free. You can download it from the Inkscape Web site, and it's even available for both Windows and the Mac! What I really like about Inkscape is its ability to work in different units, and scale all items on the page accurately to those units, and also import images and scale them to those units. That makes it really easy to do scale drawings of things... like instrument panels.

The Panel

Before you can go further, you need an accurate, scaled panel outline drawing. I went through a bit of work to get mine accurate, and if you're a Cozy builder you can leverage the fruits of my labor by downloading my blank template. Click here to do that now. Depending on your browser, you may need to right-click the link and select Save As... Some browsers can read SVG and will try to draw the file in your browser window! Once you have the file, open it in Inkscape.

If you are not a Cozy builder, don't despair... but you have some work to do. To make the file above I saved a CAD drawing and did a bit of pen work to join all the line segments and make a closed area that can then be colored. You could also do this with a photo or other drawing, as long as you had some dimensions to work with to scale it to, although you'd have less control over the fill color.

Instruments

To work on the panel, just click File->Import, and load a photo of the instrument you want to install. You can find them all over the Web - use Google Image Search, or visit the manufacturer's Web site for high quality versions! I touched up mine in Photoshop to remove white backgrounds, but that's not really necessary if you don't care about perfection.

Once you've imported the image, click in the toolbar and set your image size. For instance, if you've imported a photo of an altimeter, set the width and height to 3.125", or whatever the final instrument width is. You can then use Inkscape's Align and Distribute tool palette to arrange items on your panel to suit!

Printing

I'm still working on perfecting this technique. I wanted to be able to print an accurate, scaled drawing of my panel on my color printer, cut it out, and tape it onto the empty panel so I could see it and get a feel for how it would work. The issue is that you need to set your page size such that the final dimensions are accurate - but obviously then the print must cross multiple pages. In the commercial version of Adobe Acrobat (a 30-day demo is available) you can print large documents across multiple pages, and it will even print cut/alignment marks. That was VERY handy... but also expensive.

Do you have a better technique? Please use the Contact link in the top menu to let me know!