As heavy flight simmer, I can see potential in employing the PicoCalc as the game controller that would emulate the FMC (Flight Management Computer) in the airplanes.
But before I’ll go into more advanced tasks related to the drawing the graphics on the screen and all that screen related things, I was thinking about something simplier, the Apache KU (Keyboard Unit) for the DCS game.
Idea is to be able to see the PicoCalc as the game controller with every key from keyboard bindable as the game controller push button. It should work connected with USB cable, but shouldn’t be visible as regular computer keyboard, as the DCS can manage only one keyboard, and every another connected to computer interfere with each other.
I’d appreciate any hints and suggestions related to this task.
You could use custom HID keycodes so as not to interfere with the system keyboard, but there are only a limited number of those. However, you can define a game controller with as many independent buttons as you want, and just manually map each of them to the appropriate control. This has the benefit of not needing any extra mods to DCS.
Alternatively the usb-c connector on the picocalc is a serial output; DCS-BIOS or similar allows you to map serial data to DCS controls.
DCS-BIOS is not preferable as it is prone for issues with communication, so I am inclined rather to the solution based on making the PicoCalc recognisable as game controller is exactly what I was thinking about.
