This is a black and gold panel I designed for the Intellijel Planar 2 recordable vector joystick module. For this design I chose to ignore the rectangular frames around the jack sockets found on the original panel. Instead I color coded the text underneath them, using white color for the inputs and gold for the outputs. It’s not as easy to identify which is which, but it’s way more stylish and clean.

An obstacle I had to overcome was the cut around the joystick. On the original aluminium panel the hole around the joystick is countersunk. This was impossible to reproduce on PCB, at least to my knowledge. Instead I increased the diameter of the hole to allow the full angled movement of the joystick. But another problem emerged. Making the hole wider exposed the silver colored metallic parts underneath and that, was unacceptable. To overcome this I designed a ring shaped black sticker. After removing the panel, I installed the sticker around the joystick’s base and re-installed my panel. The sticker did a great job masking the silver parts, but I wasn’t finished yet. The inner side of the PCB hole was too bright because there was no solder mask applied there. This is something that doesn’t usually bother me simply because the inner part of the holes is covered or filled by components (knobs, jacks, LEDs, etc), but on this case it was exposed. I solved the problem simply by painting this part with a black permanent marker. After I painted there was no way to tell if this was done by hand or not, the color was deep and the ink dried immediately. The only thing left was to source black 2.5mm screws to replace the silver ones around the joystick, and so I did.

I offer these panels pre-painted, along with 2 stickers (if something goes wrong with the first one) and 4 black 2.5mm screws.