The new control panel overlay that I have been vectorizing in Adobe Illustrator is about done. The most important aspect of this control panel overlay is the button and joystick placement. As you can see, each joystick has directional indicators and the spring sticks also have indicators. If those aren’t aligned correctly to the actual cutout for the joystick and spring stick, the entire control panel will look wrong. I had to figure out a way to verify the placement of the elements before the final print was made.

I decided to make a cardboard template of the control panel. I taped a piece of cardboard to the control panel and then flipped it over. From the back side, I cut out each joystick hole, spring stick hole and button hole with an x-acto knife. I also cut the template to the actual size of the control panel. I then printed a copy of my vectorized control panel overlay to actual size and placed the template on top of it. If the hole openings on the template matched the black circles on the printed copy, everything was golden. In the end, I had to go back and tweak the locations of about 5 of the openings. When I put the template on top of the printed copy now, it’s an exact match. The black circles pictured below will not be printed in the final print.

Here’s a picture of the actual control panel overlay and the new one that will be printed and applied:

I have no idea how many hours went into reproducing this overlay. Because there isn’t any demand for this overlay, I really had no choice but to spend the time and reproduce it myself. I also don’t have a whole lot of options for printing. The overlay will likely be ink jet printed on self adhesive vinyl and laminated. I’ll have more photos once the overlay is installed on the control panel.

Edit: I just realized that there are two yellow arrows in the upper right hand instruction box, near the fingers, that I haven’t included. Those will be added before the final print is made. Fixed!