Cron,
More power to you!
First, with respect to the (commercial)Flight controls; they are expensive, and do not have some features you might want. I wanted a throttle that you could roll off to "split the needles" or kill the engine for entering autorotation. My throttle does that by sending keystrokes to kill engine when it is twisted to off. The commercial collectives either have no throttle or it only works manual throttle. The helicopter is normally flown with gov. on so the manual throttle is useless. If you do fly in manual throttle mode , the control is inadequate.
I do not know of ANY external helicopter panels. There is one for fixed wing; there are NAV/COM panels , but if you want functioning Airspeed, VSI, MP, etc, in a small pedestal, you have to build your own from scratch
with servos and such and then try to get it talk to X-Plane via com port.
It is a difficult project, but well worth the rewards if you can pull it off.
If you go the extra mile and build an enclosure and projection screen , then you essentially have a "Fly-it" type of system and they go for $79,000 US retail.(and they do not have a panel either-they use a PC monitor with instrument view-cheaters!)http://www.flyit.com/PTH.html
It's got the word helicopter on it so they figure they can charge 20X normal.
Best of luck with your project.
Try_Cyclic
[This message has been edited by Try_Cyclic (edited 05 December 2000).]