Possible new panel legend technique

[Chris Crosskey]

Hi Folks, 
I can't remember if I've just posted something like this (or if anyone else 
has in the past...)

I've just got some iron-on transfer paper so that you can make tee-shirts 
and mousemats etc using the output of an ink-jet printer. My thought is 
this....it should be possible to use them with powder-coated panels. 
Powder-coat is fairly resistant to heat (more so than the neoprenbe in 
mousepads I would have thought) and the iron on process doesn't involve 
high heat settings....Using my plotter and its fibre-point pens it should 
be possible to make reversed artwork to iron onto blank (white) panels, 
even in colour too :-)). I've made a <Dial> macro for my PCB CAD package, 
which has a plotting output I can trust, and am currently awaiting a 
delivery of white powder-coated panels. For non-gap-critical layouts 
(anything where the PCB isn't held on by potentioemters etc) then you could 
probably get away with inkjet output and some scaling experiments with 
normal paper first....

If this works it wil give me professional, fairly hard-wearing (I use it on 
a mousemat) panel layouts that are easily repeatable, availabel in almost 
individual quantities (I guess 2 x 9" x 3" from an A4 or up to a 9" x 9" is 
OK, cheap to produce, and don't require either any equipment I don't 
currently have or my presence on the far side of the local cityy to get to 
it, and also the chance to do WYSIWIG preruns on papa`er to see how it'll 
turn out. Finally (and most usefully) I can generate graphics output (OK, 
it's .IMG, but I have converters) from the package. Combine this with just 
how friendly Scooter is as a CAD program and I'm hoping that I've jkust 
found a personal holy grail of the last couple of years.

If anyone out there is using Scooter for Atari or Windows I will happily 
post you my DIAL.MAC file (it's pretty tiny) for a 19mm knob, and I'll 
generate another opne for 16mm knobs soon. It took me about an hour to put 
it together, I guess it'll be abbout 30minutes or so to take the master 
panel layout (8 dials on the Modulus published spacings) and turn it into 
any given panel....

Oh Lord please let it work :-)) Will post results in due course, though if 
anyone else has some of the stuff kick ing around and the materuials (and 
curiosity) to experimetn, I will not claim any kind of precedance :-))

chrisc