Light mounting

 As ever I'm bouncing all over the place, multiple jobs on the go and not really finishing them! Hopefully this one will be a simple one, dashboard lights. I've been looking at these for a while but only very recently got everything together to see what is required. 

First thing, the lights themselves. It'll be a 3D printed housing, with the bulb lights mounted behind them. In front will be transparent printed plastic, with a paper diffuser. As with everything I did a trial first, and came up with this;

The first print was of the colours, that's the top row of coloured bars. This looked 'ok', but not strong enough particularly with the orange. The next two are basically two layers of the same print. With the paper background the colour is strong enough, and then with light shining from behind it should be plenty.

The rows above are test symbols, basically a random set of symbols that I was using as an example. It was mainly to see whether a positive or negative symbol would be better. To be honest I'm not sure, it might come down to aesthetics rather than function! 

The symbols will be 10mm square, which will fit into a 14mm circle. The housing will follow the same design as the gauges, with a 9mm frame round them. This is a 2mm round profile, a 5mm flat and another 2mm round profile. 

In terms of what I need (from left to right);

• Left hand indicator,  a green arrow.
• Brake fluid level warning, a red exclamation in a circle. 
• Main beam, a blue 'light' symbol shining to the left.
• Side lights, a green pair of 'light' symbols.
• Fog light, a yellow 'light' symbol shining to the right.
• Battery charging condition, a red battery.
• Right hand indicator, a green arrow. 

Turns out I don't actually need orange, oh well.

This is the set of images and applicable colours ready to print;

Now I have this I can start 3D designing the housing. 

(Update). I stuck a printout of the lights roughly where they will go;

It's quite apparent that having them spaced out is not going to work, it's just too wide. The bottom row has them all touching, which looks ok but isn't physically possible. The bulb fittings are too big to work like that, and there wouldn't be any separation to stop the lights bleeding from one to the next. What I'll need to do is make it as physically close to each other without blending in. From a 3D print point of view that's around 2mm gap between them. I'm not sure how that translates to the face though, I'll see what Fusion reckons is physically possible.