Touch Portal: MSFS

[HiFlyer 9,358]

So I bumped into a little app called Touch Portal and it immediately appealed to both my inner nerd and my flight sim techyness.

Essentially, it uses your phone or tablet as an input device into your sim or program.

Its seems interesting and useful enough to me that I persevered for the few minutes needed to figure out how to set it up, and it seemed like the kind of thing others here might like as well:

There are a few things an interested party will need, to get started, so I have included some links so people who wish to try this are subjected to less wandering the web looking for relevant links.

Touch Portal App

 

Touch-Portal-MSFS/MSFSTouchPortalPlugin (Allows the App to connect with MSFS)

 

Icon Packs for your own creations

 

 

SETUP TUTORIAL: https://youtu.be/2XHeVysZziM

 

 

 

 

User-Made Panel for FlyByWire A320 + CJ4

Uses this configuration: https://flightsim.to/file/7451/a320neo-custom-camera-views

 

User-Made General Aviation Panel

 

User-Made General Aviation Panel (I really like this one)

 

User-Made Ga Touch Panel (camera specific)\

 

Edited May 1, 2021 by HiFlyer

[styckx 1,871]

*Hmph* How about them apples.. Bookmarked. My next days offf I'm all over this..

[cianpars 1,165]

I've been meaning to give this a go for ages but never got around to it as it looked a bit too fiddly for the amount of spare time I had available.  Your post has maybe spurred me on to take another look.

I do have a couple of spare Android phones lying around which have now been replaced that I could use along with my usual phone if it is possible to connect more than one device.

I did see somebody using this to control a full size B737-500 P3d based cockpit simulator using a tablet a while ago which was impressive.

Edited May 1, 2021 by cianpars

[zalox 54]

It is capable to recreate a fully working FbW A320 overhead panel?

[HiFlyer 9,358]

6 minutes ago, zalox said:

It is capable to recreate a fully working FbW A320 overhead panel?

 You probably can if you can find the correct keypress/command for each button

[HiFlyer 9,358]

7 hours ago, cianpars said:

I do have a couple of spare Android phones lying around which have now been replaced that I could use along with my usual phone if it is possible to connect more than one device.

[Noel 4,494]

Looks great!

[styckx 1,871]

So I finally tried this.

Conclusion: Handy but needs work in areas.

Vanilla. IE: No plugins. It's fine. Simply virtual hotkey front end.

Once you start adding in plugins for MSFS.. Ehhhh. No. It's buggy as all heck because for the panel to work it needs a connection to MSFS (airspeed etc), and if it doesn't get it the rest of the panel doesn't work. The connection to MSFS is hit or miss and more miss than hit.

I'll check back with this but for now.. It's a big no from me dawg

[ark 1,288]

I find one advantage of using Touch Portal (TP) 'simply' as a hotkey front end is you can assign an 'awkward' key combination, that may not be convenient to use with a regular keyboard while flying, to a single TP button, e.g, pushing a single TP button can send CTRL+SHIFT+F6 (just made that up) to the sim. With a regular keyboard that would likely take two hands. Since you can conveniently assign these awkward key combinations to TP buttons, that frees up the easy to use key combinations for your regular keyboard. You can also make one TP button conditional on the On/Off state of another button, etc. And TP buttons can also be easily programmed to act either as regular On/Off buttons, or as Toggle buttons, or as 3-way buttons, or to call programs, etc. The programming logic capability in TP is quite useful.  I use FSUIPC, and TP is handy for assigning buttons to activate FSUIPC functions, or FSUIPC Lua scripts. None of this requires a TP MSFS plugin of any kind.

Just FYI.

Al

Edited May 5, 2021 by ark

[Max Paperno 1]

MSFS Touch Portal Plugin new URL/repo/maintainer and many new features:  https://github.com/mpaperno/MSFSTouchPortalPlugin

Supports multiple Touch Portal devices, WASM integration, any and all Sim Vars and Key Events.  Certainly not just a "hotkey" front end.  Solid and reliable Sim connection with status display, logging, and a lot more.

If anyone can actually cause MSFS to crash from just using this plugin (or even my WASM module), please provide a reproducible scenario and I'd be more than happy to look into it and fix. Stability and performance are key.

Cheers,
-Max

[blueshark747 1,843]

I never remove my HMD in VR so I don't have a real use for it.

Really cool for 2D folks though...especially having controls access through smartphones.

Edited July 11, 2022 by blueshark747