Cessna 172 Six-Pack: Building a Physical Panel Overlay

As part of my Cessna 172 flight simulator project, I wanted to start with something relatively contained: recreating the C172 instrument panel around a physical overlay.

The idea sounds straightforward. Put the instruments on a monitor, build a panel around them, and add the physical controls needed to interact with them.

In practice, the display isn’t the difficult part.

The difficult part is figuring out how to turn a flat computer monitor into something that actually feels like an instrument panel.