flightosc

using your phone or tablet as a flight controller

Screenshots

Simple 3 axis controls (simple.touchosc)

Or more complex twin engine controls (6-axis, plus buttons) (twinengine.touchosc)

Or an F/A-18 like controller with finger lifts, TDC, speedbrake and more (dcs.touchosc)

INSTALLATION

You'll need the following pieces of software to make this work:

• TouchOSC on your phone or tablet.

On your Windows 10 PC you'll need:

• TouchOSC Editor - edit and upload layouts to the TouchOSC app.
• TouchOSC Bridge - a driver that translates OSC into MIDI.
• vJoy - a virtual game controller driver
• python3 - Python3 for Windows.
• (OPTIONAL) Windows Terminal
• git for Windows
• midi2vjoy - a pygame script that converts MIDI to vJoy inputs.

Note: I have a Windows 10 PC -- some of this approach may be adaptable to other platforms, but since my target is MSFS 2020 and DCS World, I'm going to stick with Windows for now.

Steps

1. Download and install the TouchOSC Editor, Bridge and vJoy from the links above. They are pretty self-explanatory.

   • Open Configure vJoy App and under "Force Feedback", uncheck "Enable Effects".
   • Change "Number of Buttons" from 8 to 30.
   • Restart Windows.
   • Note that "vJoy Device: 1" should be enabled by default. Adding other devices may confuse MSFS.
   • vJoy Device List when run should display a single number "1" in black and all other device numbers in grey.

2. Then install Python3 for Windows from the official site:

   • Download "Windows x86-64 executable installer" from the links on the bottom of the page.
   • Run the installer.
   • Keep "Install launcher for all users (recommended)" checked.
   • Check "Add Python 3.8 to PATH".
   • Click "Install Now"

3. Check Python install. You should see the following result in a console:

    PS C:\Users\lkyra> python -V
    Python 3.8.5
   

4. Next pick a directory and clone the following projects:

    PS C:\Users\lkyra> mkdir github
    PS C:\Users\lkyra> cd github
    PS C:\Users\lkyra\github> git clone https://github.com/c0redumb/midi2vjoy.git
    PS C:\Users\lkyra\github> git clone https://github.com/coldnebo/flightosc.git
   

5. Now, install midi2vjoy:

    PS C:\Users\lkyra> cd midi2vjoy
    PS C:\Users\lkyra\midi2vjoy> python setup.py install		
   

6. Next, run the TouchOSC Bridge and the TouchOSC Editor and then open the following file in the editor:

    C:\Users\lkyra\github\flightosc\simple.touchosc
   

   • If this has worked, press the "Sync" button in the Editor.
   • Go to TouchOSC on your phone or table and click Layout.
     • Click "Add"
     • Click "Edit", "+" and then enter either the hostname or the IP (I had to enter the IP) of your PC.
     • Click "Done"
     • Click the "Editor Hosts": and click your HOST/IP.
     • "simple" should now show up in Layouts on your phone or tablet. Select it.
     • You'll see a control layout that matches what you see in the Editor... three sliders labeled (throttle, mixture, flaps). The touchosc.conf file in flightosc maps these three sliders to X, Y and Z axes in vJoy.

7. Run midi2vjoy with the included bat file:

    PS C:\Users\lkyra> cd flightosc
    PS C:\Users\lkyra\flightosc> touchosc.bat
   

8. Test vJoy:

   • Open the "Game Controllers" panel from Windows Settings and select "vJoy Device" and then click "Properties".

   • You should see the X, Y and Z axes move when you move the respective sliders on your phone.

CONGRATS!!! You have successfully configured your phone or tablet as a virtual game controller!

Now go into MSFS 2020 and configure the vJoy device (you may need to look for "custom" configuration) and configure the controls in a way that makes sense to you. I chose to invert some of the axis so that they visually matched what was happening in the controls... but you can customize it however you want.

Enjoy!

HISTORY

2020 Aug 29: I was minding my own business when one day my throttle controller breaks. After researching online and trying everything I can think of, I'm pretty sure it's dead. It seems that the firmware/hardware for that device brand sometimes flakes out. So, I have a ticket in to the support site, BUT due to the amazing popularity of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, they have a backlog of a few weeks. Also, all the other replacement throttles I might purchase are out-of-stock, again because MSFS 2020 is super popular right now.

So, I needed a replacement, preferably cheap, that I can use in the interim. I tried the keyboard (of course), but one of the things that is not so obvious about keys is the relative setting of something like a throttle. For example, if I hold down "increase throttle" for a few seconds, where is the throttle setting? I don't have a tactile representation of the percentage of throttle I want to set. Ideally this would have the form of a physical slide switch. The hunt began and naturally, since all the flight controllers were back-ordered, I turned to another popular kind of device: music controllers.

Physical Switches

The most promising physical switch I found was Mine S customizable controller at around $299 USD for a basic bundle. This reminds me of Lego Robotics kits, but for audio production.

Another alternative is the Korg nanoKONTROL2 around $70 USD. Or, even cheaper, the Fegoo Easy Control.9 around $55 USD.

But then I remembered an app I used to use on my phone... TouchOSC.

Software Switches

TouchOSC is a popular implementation for phones and tablets of the Open Sound Control Protocol and allows virtual sliders to communicate with your computer via OSC/MIDI.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one having these thoughts as I found the c0redumb/midi2vjoy which connects MIDI outputs to a virtual game controller provided by the vJoy driver.

So, now I discovered a path, from TouchOSC on my iPhone to vJoy to Microsoft Flight Simulator! Victory!!

FUTURE WORK

There are a lot of steps to get things connected. In theory, this could be streamlined if a driver was written that could act as an OSC client and implement IGameController in order to be registered as a game device in Windows. This could avoid having to translate OSC to MIDI and then MIDI to vJoy.

Refs

• IGameController Interface [Windows Dev Center]
• Guide to OSC Libraries - old
• Another list of Libraries - hmmm, Rust? Python/Ruby... etc. Rust might be best fit for Windows driver development.