How to Use MobiFlight with a Joystick

MobiFlight is a powerful Arduino-based tool.

But what if you don’t have an Arduino?

Can MobiFlight still be used?

YES!!

MobiFlight also supports joysticks (which we’ll talk about now) and Arcaze modules (which are basically obsolete)

Start off by plugging in your joystick then opening MobiFlight

On the MobiFlight screen go to “Inputs”, activate a new row, name it and click the 3 edit dots.

Jump over to the Input tab, and select your Module (joystick) and Device (button)

Select your action type for “On Press”

You can select whatever action type you want (explained here). I’ll use MSFS2020 Events because they are easy to explain.

You can filter these by Vendor, Aircraft, System, and even use the built-in “Search” function.

Then select your desired preset from the list!

“On Press” works best for buttons that replicate buttons

In my example when you press the button the MFD Barometer increases it. No matter how many times I press the button this happens.

This works great!

When this doesn’t work great:

What doesn’t work so well is defining a position based on a single “On Press/On Release” button. For example, configuring the landing gear up/down using a single button.

Setting an “On Press” to DOWN and an “On Release” to UP would make it so that whenever you are holding the button down the gear goes down, but whenever you release the gear go up. Not an ideal situation on short final.

Fix 1:

To fix this you can use “toggle” events.

Assign “GEAR_TOGGLE” to “On Press” (but not on release). Now whenever you click the button the gear will change position.

Fix 2:

You can also assign two buttons, and have each with an individual function.

Assign button 8 to up

Assign button 9 to down

Whenever you press 8 the gear goes up

Whenever you press 9 the gear goes down

Boom!