Tips for designing the front panel

[jtommi]

Does anybody have good tips regarding front panel design?
I’m thinking about CAD, but anything is welcome.
It’s too soon for improvising, I’m very bad at guesstimating.

This morning I started designing the blank panels in FreeCAD, but when it came time to add jacks, pots, etc I felt a bit overwhelmed.
Before investing more time into learning, I wanted to see if you have better ideas.

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so a CAD program where you could drag&drop basic components in would be great.
FreeCAD allows that (with the macro Partslibrary), but it could be easier.

[analogoutput]

There’s some discussion in

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[twinturbo]

front panel for what?

I do my PCB’s in Kicad and then just work the front panel from the PCB layout

[jtommi]

For my modules.
I’m gonna start with Eurorack format, so the PCB will probably be perpendicular in most cases and thus not really relevant to the front panel.

In the meantime I managed to progress in FreeCAD (I probably didn’t do it as it should be done, but it worked)

[ChristianBloch]

Those pots and jacks look awfully close together. Are you sure there’s enough room to mount them?

[jtommi]

@ChristianBloch

Are you sure there’s enough room to mount them?

Absolutely not

I think what I’ll do first is cut out some cardboard panels take some parts, and just look at them to get a vague idea of the proportions.