I had to do some thinking over the past few days. I had some birthday money burning a hole in my pocket and was very tempted to splurge on some 'reach' goals — fully wireless, navball display, DSKY interface. I ended up reigning in those tendencies and will be at very least holding off on that until I have a first pass at an enclosure which is not a shoebox. I doubt that will chew through all of my available funds, but I need to focus on that first.

The only exception is that I'm going to work on designing and modeling a throttle handle. I decided to investigate pricing for 3D printing and found that it wouldn't be too bad for the size I'm looking for. I'll probably order it from Shapeways, but apparently my local library has a 3D printer, so I might give that a shot first.

Otherwise not too much to report. I'm still waiting for my PCBs to arrive from Singapore. I've done a bit more modeling, the only thing remaining is the arcade buttons for the trackball (which is mostly a copypasta job) and the small action group buttons. All the displays and such are modeled to at least a reasonable degree of accuracy. I wouldn't 100% trust the exact placement of the displays relative to the mounting holes, but for the purposes of layout and space management it should be sufficient.

For an enclosure, I've decided to go with wood as a base. At some point in the future, I'll start experimenting with acrylic for a nice surface. Eventually I'd like to have designs masked off and backlit, but that will have to wait for now.