Touchbuddy and Touchscreens

Touchbuddy is a free Windows application that allows you to enter keyboard inputs via a touchscreen. It allows you to create your own interfaces that look like cockpit panels or any other interface you can imagine and when you press the touchscreen it can send a keystroke to your application. When you touch the screen you can have the image under your finger change, so (for example) you can have toggle switches change position. There are several community made profiles available for Falcon 4, Lock On, ARMA and Winamp from the Touchbuddy website and there is a developer kit to make your own. The application supports embedding ActiveX applets like PDF readers for accessing maps and manuals in-sim and also has the ability to show cockpit information from Lock On.

Here is a sample video from the Touchbuddy website showing a touchscreen being used with Lock On:

That profile uses very simple buttons. Simon Cookman's profile for Falcon 4 provides interfaces that look like real panels complete with toggle and rotary switches:


Touchscreens can be very expensive, especially once you go beyond the small 10" or smaller touchscreens coming out of China intended for cars. But you can buy "touch panels" much more cheaply, saving up to 80% over larger touchscreens of 19 inches (assuming you have a 19" LCD monitor), because you are only buying the touch part of the touchscreen without the LCD display unit. You put the touch panel over an existing LCD monitor either fitting it between the plastic bezel and LCD screen or placing it on top of the bezel of your LCD monitor. I have a 15 inch Touchkit touch panel I bought on Ebay and I've just taped mine to a 15" LCD using black electrical tape. Electrical tape - is there anything it can't do? The touch panel consists of a 3mm thick glass panel, a small controller connected via ribbon cable to the panel and a USB cable to your PC:



Touchbuddy is an excellent app but there is a problem with some games/sims. Touchbuddy generates a left mouse click input when you press the screen. This means in games that use the left mouse button to fire a weapon - for example Armed Assault, Touchbuddy doesn't work correctly. You press the screen and you fire your weapon. There are ways around this. You can use Touchbuddy in client/server mode. That is, running the touchscreen and Touchbuddy off a second PC with the second PC sending just the keystrokes over the network to the other PC running the Touchbuddy client. This works very well. I've also read of people running Touchbuddy in a Virtual Machine to send keystrokes to the host running the virtual machine, unsure how exactly they do this.

Using a Touchscreen for Falcon 4.

In response to a forum post on Frugalsworld, I tried out using the touchscreen to press the buttons in the cockpit of Falcon4:AF. That is use the touchscreen as a fully clickable cockpit. That worked reasonably ok, the ICP was easy to press as were the toggle switches in the side panels, but the MFD buttons are very small on a 15" screen running at 1024x768 and that was problematic. I would occasionally press the wrong button. On a larger screen I think it would be ok.

Here is a video of me using the touchscreen in Falcon 4:AF with the default pit:

On using a Touchscreen as your primary monitor for Falcon 4 I had an issue using a touch screen with rotary switches. For example in Falcon the rotary switches require a right mouse click to turn the rotary switch in an anti-clockwise direction. With some touch screens like the screens using the latest Touchkit drivers a right mouse click is supported by holding your finger on the screen for a short duration. But this is the problem I had - when you first press the screen you still generate a left mouse click that has to be undone. So it works like this: You press and hold the screen. You first generate a left mouse click, then by holding your finger down you generate a right mouse click. You continue to hold your finger on the screen you generate another right click. What this means is that using the rotary switches you initially switch the wrong way and it takes a couple of seconds to do two or more switches back the other (correct) way.

I don't use the 15" screen for Falcon like this normally, I just tried it to see how it would work.