One of my favorite programs to learn has been Corel Draw. It has an amazing ability to take old graphics and photos and turn them into something new and full of life. It also has a somewhat artificial look and feel to it, so illustrations can be made cleanly with the normal grit and parallax of photography. One really neat thing about vector drawn graphics is that when zoomed in to microscopic levels, you don't get the grainy effect you see in JPG photos. It still has nice crisp edges and prints out beautifully.

Since my childhood, I have always been fascinated by the Apollo missions to the moon. I watched them on TV with a sense of awe as a kid, but as I have grown older and learned a lot about flight, electronics, and the technology that makes it all happen, the systems inside the Apollo {particularly the Lunar Module} have grown fonder. I enjoy that others have taken this level of learning much deeper than I ever cared for, while drawing these panels I was able to locate resources of people who have such a depth of insight into these systems. Much of how the mission was accomplished, the engineering feats that it took, the math, the computer technology - archaic as it was, the incredible risks, the training and simulation systems that were required to pull off this mission was huge.

Control panels have also fascinated me from a young age, it seems that when I played as a child everything became the Helm from the original Star Trek series. During my early high school years I built a control panel that didn't do much, but had some really great switches and lights which I had purchased from an automotive parts store using my meager paycheck and lots of leftover phone wires. My first music synthesizer kit was the Paia Gnome, and it had one of the best control panels I ever diddled with, although I wasn't particularly wow'd by the sound of the Gnome after I'd listened to so much Moog music back then - ha.

The Apollo Lunar Module seemed a natural challenge to my drawing skills, and I was able to locate some very large black and white panel graphics on the web to overlay, and lots of technical manuals and books to make sure my text was what the panels originally had on them. It was pointed out to me by several experts in this field there were several iterations of the Lunar Module panels. However, my interest was not to cover each and every aspect of the Lunar Modules controls, but to create a panel graphic that could be a snapshot of one of them. It wasn't to be an exhaustive resource of panel variants and block upgrades.

This project actually started off as an electronics project I have in work to recreate the workings of the Apollo AGC / DSKY (Display / Keypad) using a Z80 computer to emulate the original hardware. I have seen some fascinating recreations of this electronic monstrosity, and thought it would be a fun challenge. This project is now still several layers back in my list of things to accomplish in my workshop, but the parts are slowly filtering in for it.

My first iteration of the DSKY was simply overlayed in Corel onto a GIF of the panel I'd downloaded. Anytime you trace like this, you can expect accuracy to go right out the window. It may look similar in most respects, but that's about where it ends. Digit spacing, switch sizes and other sizes of objects were not consistent throughout. I had laser cut and etched these onto white and clear plexiglass and although it looks great, the flaws became evident on inspection. And so I went back to the drawing board.

Starting with the existing graphic, I went thru and recreated each panel layer as though I were assembling one from aluminum parts. I corrected the switch sizes so they were consistent and had to adjust the spacing so they all fit accurately centered onto the panel. Same thing with the green digit displays and the operating lamp display on the upper left. I also changed the font to one more easily recognized by the VersaLaser software so that etching the numbers into the plexiglass would look correct and also be correctly centered on each pushbutton.

I realize my creation is probably far from accurate, but honestly I don't have access to an actually NASA DSKY where I could sit down with it and a set of calipers and make 1/1000" accurate measurements. What I did do was to try to standardize the sizes of elements to common English measurements (e.g. 0.750", 1.0" x 0.7", etc) so that standardized electronic devices could be used to fabricate the final product. So while the purist may write and tell me how badly off some of the spacing is, for my use it is "Good Enough". Plus, I think it will wow just about anyone who comes into the shop and sees it working.

The Rest of the Story
As I looked over the whole LM panel graphic, I realized it used many common elements so that once a bat-handle switch was drawn, it could be copied throughout the panels, a rotary knob, a volume rotary potentiometer, gauges, 7-segment displays and so forth. And so I set out to draw the panels. As I copied certain switches and things, I realized very quickly from the GIF panel that many of the toggle switches and knobs were not set in perfect alignment with others nearby. I did my best to replicate this effect even though my inner AR spirit was wrestling with the idea that switches should generally be in a straight line.

Here's a sample {above} from Panel 1, you can see while some elements are aligned, others are clearly not.

After I completed my panels, I also stumbled across some technical drawings of the windows used to align the landing target and the overhead window used to align the docking port for the Apollo Command Module. These were very interesting pieces of glass because (and I'm leaving out the technical part about the materials use to build them) dots placed on the different layers allowed the viewer to "line up" his eyeball to the window so the scales near them could be used to determine how far close or off target they were. This is just some elementary geometry, but it goes to show the great insight of the engineers who built it. I decided these were worthy components of the Apollo LM and added them to this sheet.

After I looked over this seemly final product it occured to me something of the most basic information was mission from the graphic: The exterior view of the Lunar Module itself. After all, what the heck is this thing anyway? And so I located another black and while GIF file, after browsing tons of them on the web I decided on one that had a good angle, showed plenty of detail without going overboard and would suffice for the general LM illustration to be placed onto the main LM panel graphic page.

So I overlayed this in Corel and began drawing my elements over it. Although I realized quickly there were going to be some details that just didn't need to be at this level of illustration. And so, with a little freedom to simplify things, here's the end result:

And so, the final product was merged together and here's my result:

Click the image for a larger version.

Hope you like it - I had a lot of fun putting it together! Wanna buy a large one? Contact me.