Kerbal Space Orbit Gauge Build (Detailed!)

This meter displays my in-game orbital info (apoapsis and periapsis and orbital status) in real time as i play!
(I told you guys phase two was coming!)
Last time i showed you a the build process for my custom ksp controller, but this time i went for something that (to me) is more involved!

As usual, it all starts with a sketch! We’ll get to that panel and the other gauges later, but i wanted to start with something smaller!

I selected these 8-digit 7segment displays for the project, because they have onboard MAX7219 LED drivers and are require relatively few pins compared to having to wire up these leds in a matrix and drive them manually (and at 5V operating volatage they are safe to run from USB)

First thing was to mess with these displays a bit and get used to the code outside of the main code, which also handles grabbing serial data from ksp and converts it to usable data for my arduino.

This display relies on the KSPSerialIO plugin, written by zitronen over on the ksp forums!

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/60281-hardware-plugin-arduino-based-physical-display-serial-port-io-tutorial-24-11-19/

After some designing and cad work, i had a little panel to hold these displays the way i wanted, along with an RGBW Neopixel next to each screen

I used my ELEGOO Mars 3D printer, and printed out the plates!

Rarely do designs like this work on the first print, i was really excited tbh haha. This part holds the nuts for the machine screws...

Which sandwich the display and also hold the LED Neopixel in place

Again, its just crazy when details like this work the first print when i was just using tolerances based on experience.

I wired in a debug display because the serial monitor is not available when the arduino is pulling data real time from ksp over the serial port

LOTS of coding in arduino IDE later, i had the apoapsis displaying on a display in the xorrect format!

Getting the second was as simple as wiring it in and copy and pasting the code for the apoapsis right?
I wish haha

Not only did it bork my apopasis display, but it was returning gibberish....something was screwy in my code!

When I solicited the help of my programming friend (without whom this project would not have happened so shoutout to ya W!) he asked to see my wiring to see if he could take a stab at debugging and well.....

Its never a bad idea to reorganize! If youre keeping track of what youre doing you can easily rewire!

And when you do hopefully its a little cleaner haha

After a couple days more of coding i had some relevant values on both displays! That was a big victory

It wasn’t the last thing i had planned tho! I still had those orbital status LEDs to code in
Luckily, unlike the MAX7219 drivers these I had experience with already, so that wasn’t too difficult
I love how easy neopixels are to code

I took the time to go ahead and mount everything so i could organize wiring a little further

And then i painted some details black on the faceplates to add contrast and make it look a little less molded!

I heard you guys like these

The screws on the front panel are faux!

Finished painting

And installed and ready to go! Im not gonna clean up wiring cause next up on my list is that altimeter you see to the bottom right!

When your apsis values are between 45-70km you get an orange status LED

And then green once you reach 70km! Once you have 2 greens youve reached orbit!

This project was a doozey haha but i hope you guys enjoyed seeing how it came together!

Hopefully there will be much more to come on this ksp cockpit project!