MobiFlight Community Support

Hi all,

After having been away from the Flight Sim hobby for several years since the announcement of MSFS 2020, I am back at the hobby. Until now, I have mainly done VFR flying in GA planes, but now I am moving to the Cessna Longitude.

Since late last year, I have been working on building two GTC570s that are part of the Garmin G3000 Avionics suite. With my two left hands, I have built a wooden box that contains two 7-inch touch screens, one for the (left) PFD and the other for the (left) MFD. So far, no MobiFlight is involved :-D . However, underneath each touchscreen, there are three rotary encoders. In the pictures, you can see that the encoders for the left GTC570 the encoders are missing; this is still work in progress.
The encoders of each GTC570 are connected to two Arduino Pro Micros (bought at the MF webshop :-) ), and all USB cables are connected to a USB hub. This way, only one USB connection is required to connect the whole thing to my computer.

It is by far not as good-looking as I hoped for, but it works! In time, I want to print the box with a 3D printer.

The remaining work includes:
- soldering/wiring the encoders of the PFD
- create and mount a small board for the second Arduino Pro micro
- try to replace both left encoders with an HID joystick

As mentioned in the last bullet, after the AAU1 update (late January 2023), Microsoft/Asobo/Working Title replaced the left encoders with joysticks. If anybody has a suggestion on what joystick I could use for my home GTCs, I am very interested to know. I ran into the AZ Delivery KY-023, but I don't know if that's supported by MobiFlight.




Happy flight simming with MobiFlight!

Thank you,
Lex

Hello Lex,

your design looks fantastic.How you manage dual touchscreen availablity on Windows? I am able to get only one GTC570 screen working with touch, all others are only displays with no touch function...

You are right that after AAU1 left knob is replaced by joystick but this is exactly as in real unit. KY-023 isn´t accurate. The real knob is still a rotary with 4 possition joystick movement but it moves very little (there are tactile sitches around) so you hardly notice joystick movement (it is around 0,2-0,3mm).
I used this joystick from flightsimmaker:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4222606
with combination with my frame remix:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6163116

Guess you are using mobiflight as sim interface - there is a custom preset from joystic range (I am not able to google search at the moment, if you are interested I will send it to you from my mobiflight settiings). I am using KY-040 encoder with flightsimmaker design (buttons) and that is closest to real thing I have seen so far. Note that you will easily live with only encoder and push - push function will enable display touch as a mouse touchpad and that supplies joytick function.

Cheers
Michal

Hi Michal,

Thanks for the compliments and for reaching out to me!

First things first: Configuring multiple touch screens is easy. Assuming you run Windows 10, you need to follow the below steps:
1 - Open the Control Panel
2 - In the Search box (upper-right corner), type Tablet PC Settings
3 - Open the Tablet PC Settings app
4 - In the Display tab page, in the Configure frame, hit the Setup... button and follow the instructions
5 - That should be it; I hope it works. I have 3 touch screens, and it works like it should. Sometimes Windows loses the configuration, but if you do the same steps again, you should be fine

Thanks for sharing the Thingiverse links; I have a 3D printer nowadays, so I could give it a go. Still, I am interested to know what rotary encoder is used in that video because that would be the ultimate way to go. I tried a component (can't find which one that was now), which is a joystick with a button and a rotary encoder but I did not get it to work with Mobiflight. Your solution sounds good as a close-by solution. I am indeed interested in those MobiFlight Presets, although I might have been involved in that, too .

Hope you get the touchscreens to work!

Cheers,
Lex