The MFD (Multi-function display) is salvaged from an old laptop. It is not running GameGlass, like so many others SimPits out there do. Mostly because I’m not a fan of touchscreens or vendor lock-in. There is also the little detail that GameGlass is simply not available for my operating system and does not know about all the Space Pew Pew I usually do.

When I was evaluating what to use to program mine I was caught between the difficult choice to learn yet another fancy framework, like Raylib, that would do OpenGL ES 2.0 without X11 on the Raspberry Pi, or OpenFrameworks, or simply go with something I knew already.

In the end I just threw the might of my CoffeeLake at it and went with React since most of the data was already available via Node-RED over Websockets anyway. Also… Arwes is just so cool (alpha version or not) 🤩 and I had some experience with it thanks to my Streaming Overlay that I also wrote with Arwes. Connecting it to Node-RED was just a matter of installing Socket.IO to transport the messages. I rewrote the whole thing for version 2 though because the code for version 1 was a very hacky mess and the older Arwes version was deprecated. The core functionality is still the same though.

Originally posted at https://simpit.dev/version-2/mfd-software/