Let Your Creativity Fly with This DIY Flight Sim Switch Panel

LimaJuliett designed an interactive flight panel featuring a row of interface switches and internal lighting.

Jeremy Cook
4 years ago

Creator LimaJuliett has spent many years in the flight sim community, and as such has become involved with more and more complicated aircraft. Although controlling an airplane would be challenging in itself, actually mousing around to find on-screen switches to flip, while still controlling the flight stick is inconvenient and unrealistic. To enhance his flight sim experience, this hacker designed an interactive flight panel featuring a row of interface switches and internal lighting.

The front switches are wired into a Teensy 3.2, which emulates an auxiliary controller as an HID input. The Teensy was chosen here for its HID capabilities, and 3/4/LC models should work just as well. Two blue LED lights are attached to the inside of the device, shining out through its transparent cover. The inside is pained white to enhance this effect, which contrasts nicely with the black on the outside.

While such an HID unit would likely be entirely custom according to your needs, the build lays out quite a few tips that should be applicable to whatever you create. Notably, certain flight sim functions need a two-or three-position switch, so you’ll want to be sure to pick the right units, and using them as pull-up inputs is a good idea so they’re not left floating. LimaJuliett also used a debounce library to account for any jitter when engaging the contacts. Code is available on the write-up, and the project is worth checking out to see what worked well, and what mistakes to avoid!

Jeremy Cook
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!
Latest articles
Sponsored articles
Related articles
Latest articles
Read more
Related articles