UFC - Universal Flight Connector

Warning

Universal Flight Connector in a beta stage!

UFC is a cross-platform library and tool that connects devices and other tools to flight simulators, and provides a simple cross-sim library for making connecting to flight simulators easy. UFC defines its own Sim/Aircraft-agnostic data and command sets that mean device and aircraft definitions will work with everything else.

UFC is also available as a plugin for X-Plane 12.

Work in progress

UFC will also (eventually!) provide access to navigation data provided by the simulator such as airport, fixes and procedures.

Installation

Required Libraries

• yaml-cpp
• hidapi (libusb version on Linux)
• lua

Optional Libraries

Required for the PFD:

• cairomm
• pangomm
• freetype
• glm
• SDL2

Mac

$ brew install hidapi yaml-cpp lua 

Optionally:

$ brew install cairomm pangomm freetype2 glm sdl2

Ubuntu

$ apt install libyaml-cpp-dev libhidapi-dev lua5.4 liblua5.4-dev

Optionally:

$ apt install libcairomm-1.16-dev libpangomm-2.48-dev libfreetype-dev libglm-dev libsdl2-dev

Build

$ git submodule update --init
$ cmake -B build
$ cmake --build build

Usage

X-Plane Plugin

I will look in to packaging this up properly, but for now:

• Create ${PATH_TO_XPLANE}/Resources/plugins/ufc
• Copy the libufc-plugin.so/dylib to the plugin directory as mac.xpl or lin.xpl (Depending on platform)
• Copy the contents of the data/x-plane directory to the plugin directory
• ... And that's it! No configuration is required

ufctool

ufctool is the main tool for using UFC.

Usage: ufctool [OPTIONS]
-c, --config  Specify configuration file. (Default: $HOME/.config/ufc.yaml)
-d, --data    Specify data directory (Defaults to configured directory)
-s, --source  Data Source type (Overrides configured source)
-h, --help    This help text

Configuration

The configuration file uses YAML. I'm removing the need for configuration slowly, it should figure out most things for itself, except for the X-Plane installation directory.

The default path for the configuration is $HOME/.config/ufc.yaml

# Where is the data installed?
dataDir: /usr/local/share/ufc
# Default Data Source
dataSource: XPlane

# X-Plane specific 
xplane:
  path: "/Path/To/X-Plane 12"
  host: 127.0.0.1
  port: 49000

Compatibility

Platforms

• MacOS
• Linux

There's no reason UFC couldn't work on Windows, but I haven't got a Windows machine to work with. (Pull Requests are welcome!)

Flight Simulators

At the moment there is only support for:

X-Plane 12

(And probably 11, but I haven't tested it)

You can connect to X-Plane as a separate process using ufctool or using the plugin. Using the ufctool, you can connect from a different machine which means devices connected to a different computer can still be used in X-Plane.

Aircraft:

• All aircraft using the default data refs and commands
• Laminar Research A330
• ToLiss (Only tested with the A321)
• FlightFactor 777v2
• ... And more coming! (Insert another plea for Pull Requests!)

Simulated Simulator

A simple simulator is provided for testing. It returns dummy data and responds to some commands.

Clock

Use your radio or WinWing FCU as a clock :-)

Try:

./ufctool --source Clock

Others

UFC is designed so it can also work with MS Flight Simulator and P3D, but I don't have a Windows machine available. (Again, Pull Requests are welcome!)

Devices and Connectors

• WinWingSim FCU
• An example USB HID radio panel
• SDL display
  • A simple PF-style flight display
• Console output
  • For testing, disabled by default

Coming soon:

• Generic USB HID Devices
  • Map HID/Joystick devices using configuration files

How it works

Data and Commands

UFC defines its own abstract commands and data references. Each simulator/aircraft can then map these to their specific definitions.

Devices can then read from this common structure to present data and send commands without any simulator/aircraft specific changes.

For X-Plane, the aircraft configuration can be found here.

Note: The ability to use Lua to transform data and commands to and from the common format is coming soon!

Contributions

Contributions of code and aircraft definitions are more than welcome! Send me a PR!

License

These libraries are available under the LGPL v3 license. You can use them in any open or closed source projects, but if you make changes to any of my code, you have to make those changes available.

UFC is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

UFC is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.