Make Your Own Front Panels

Making front panel layouts (for use in machining blank panels) and generating foils for front panels do not impose particularly heavy demands on either the PC itself or the drawing program. As a rule, any drawing program that allows multiple layers to be simultaneously displayed and edited is fully adequate.Some examples of suitable programs are Designer 3.1 and Draw (both from MicrografX), CorelDraw 3 (from Corel) and AutoCAD.Usually, the drawing program determines the requirements for the hardware. A 33-MHz 386 processor is adequate for somewhat older software, but modern programs will need a Pentium with at least 16 MB of working memory. Graphics software is usually very computation intensive and thus requires a relatively large amount of memory.