Take Control Of MS Flight Sim With Your Smartphone And This Open-Source App

Microsoft Flight Simulator view from behind an aircraft, with it flying towards a bridge in the background and some land on either side covered with trees and greenery. Bottom left, and bottom right are shown some gauges such as airspeed, power, fuel level, altitude, etc. Top right is an insert showing two hands holding a smartphone in landscape position with 7 blue buttons on the screen. To each side of the phone are two game controller attachments fastened to the side of the phone.

Anyone with more than a passing interest in flight simulators will eventually want to upgrade their experience with a HOTAS (Hands On Throttle-And-Stick) setup that has buttons and switches for controlling your virtual aircraft’s assorted systems, which are well supported by games such as Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS). But a traditional HOTAS system can be a bit of an investment, so you might want to thank Vaibhav Sharma for the virtualHOTAS project that brings a configurable HOTAS interface to your phone — just in time to try out that Dune expansion for MSFS.

The phone’s orientation sensors are used as a joystick, and on the screen, there’s both sliders and buttons you can use as in-game controls.

What’s interesting with this is that there is no app installed on the phone, so it should work with Android and iOS. The app is an open-source Python app running on the computer, and the computer accesses it via a browser URL. Also, as it is a general interface, it will likely work as a general-purpose interface for other projects as well.

See https://hackaday.com/2024/06/01/take-control-of-ms-flight-sim-with-your-smartphone/

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