New sleak design
homebrew 11/40 system - sleak version

This is the new front panel of my PDP-11/35 home built 'system'. It is a bit longer but also less high, making the front panel more appealing as it looks sleakier. The dimensions of the front are 36 cm long and 12.5 cm high. I had to pull a few strings among old R&D collegues, but they made the border from one piece of 12 mm thick aluminium.
Looking from the front side, the panel is built of the following "layers" :

the aluminium frame
dark-red plexiglass bezel
1 mm thick aluminium plate to mount the switches and the LEDs
1 mm thick aluminium plate to mount the I/O board and the CPU board

The frame to finish the front could also be made of wood, but if you can find a friend to work with aluminium ...
The plexiglass bezel has drilled holes for the switches, the first aluminium plate has the holes for all the switches and all the LEDs. The precision of the drilling of the holes determines how good the end result will look, so spend much time on this part of the mechanical job!
The LEDs are installed on the plate with simple LED clips.

The original design did not have any (white) text writings like "ADDRESS" or "DATA" etc., even the "PDP-11/35" text.
On the new design I wanted those texts, but silk-screen or any other method was not available to me, or the letters would easily scratch in time. So, I have choosen to make all text writing behind the plexiglass where it is well protected.
How I did it? I used FrameMaker to get all text strings at the exact location. After a few print outs on an A3-sized sheet I got it all right. Any good DTP program will allow 'real-world' sized designing, I doubt Word will give a good result ...
The printed output is black on white (white paper with black text). I wanted the 'reverse', white on black! In the properties of the printer driver I could select "negate output", et voilà the printed sheet was black and the text was white! I used spray glue to stick the sheet on the first aluminium plate.
sleak version, side view
Next job is the wiring of all the switches and LEDs.
I started with soldering the resistors for the LEDs and the pull-up resistors of the switches, and the +5V and GND rail. After that came the wiring to the connectors on the I/O board.

At that time I also figured out what to do with the white "switches". The white switches on a real PDP-11/35 are not switches at all but one of the white switches on the PDP-11/70 is real and operates as a "lamp test". Pressing that switch will turn on all lamps at the same time. This is what I implemented for the white (momentary push) switches :

lamp test (but activating all LEDs is done in software)
reset of the 6802 front-end processor
debug-mode / normal-mode operation of the 6802 front-end processor (determined at reset)
reset of the internal PC that runs the SIMH or Ersatz-11 software

The internal PC is an industrial PC/104 board with all goodies on-board: VGA, IDE, floppy, parallel and serial I/O. These boards are cheap to get on eBay, new they are way too expensive for a hobby purpose. I have choosen for PC/104 because of the small size, but any common PC is fine.
You could leave the internal PC out of the design, the front-end would be just some 10 to 15 cm deep. It needs only a power supply and a serial connection to the PC on your desk to have a PDP-11/40 on your desk as well!