Building an "affordable" home cockpit

If you're an aviation enthusiast and want to bring your flight sim experience to the next level with a home cockpit, you've got a few options right now: * Get a pre-built one... those cost you somewhere around 60-80k EUR * Get individual parts and build it your self... that's also expensive. A simple front panel (without any electronics) can cost more than it costs me to built it with self designed PCB and 3D printed front panel... Also, some ready to use panels are expensive too. The MCDU for example, the part where pilots interact with the Flight Management and Guidance Computer (FMGC), can cost around one grand each, and for the A320 you need 2 of them. * The last option is fully DIY. There are some people out there who have done that already but sources for building your own are scarce, at times in proprietary formats and generally only bits and pieces here and there, not a repo of ready to use files for a full cockpit. So I set out to build part of my own A320 cockpit, this time also with the explicit goal to make it easy for others to replicate this. I gonna talk about the journey I've had so far, where I ran into issues and what I'm looking forward to