Saitek Flight Panel keyboard emulation for Linux

This is not the world's most sophisticated piece of software, but it works. It's not actually proper keyboard emulation, but it does produce keystrokes with xdotool.

While looking into various USB APIs in order to capture events from the Saitek Flight Switch Panel, I discovered that evtest displays events from the device just fine. So, rather than dive deeper down the USB specification I'm just reading stdout from this process and doing a simple mapping, then using xdotool to emulate keystrokes.

Here's how to use this for yourself.

1. Run /usr/bin/evtest and ensure the device is there and working; it should look something like this:

$ evtest
No device specified, trying to scan all of /dev/input/event*
Not running as root, no devices may be available.
Available devices:
/dev/input/event2:      Thrustmaster T.Flight Hotas X
/dev/input/event3:      CH PRODUCTS CH PRO PEDALS USB 
/dev/input/event4:      Intretech Saitek Pro Flight Switch Panel
Select the device event number [0-4]: 

2. Either modify the script so that the correct device is specified (in my case, /dev/input/event4) or pass this in as an argument with --device.
3. Modify the mapping.csv (or another file, specified as an argument with --mapping) so that your preferred keystrokes are in there. The format is switch name,state,keystroke. The switch names are in the python file and appended below. The possible states are "0" or "1" in every case. The keystrokes are strings passed to xdotool, so see the xdotool docs for more information; here's a list of keycode names. Quick hint: "A", "F5", "ctrl+c" do what you'd expect. You can run in verbose mode to experiment with these values. If the first character of the mapping is !, this will be discarded and the rest will be sent to xdotool as a type command instead of a key command, this works for binding multiple keystrokes to a switch.
4. Run the script as python saitek_keymap.py. python saitek_keymap.py --verbose will print debug info, python saitek_keymap.py --show-mapping will validate and display the results of parsing mapping.csv.

Button names:

battery
alternator
avionics
fuel
deice
pitot
cowl
panel
beacon
nav
strobe
taxi
landing
engine_off
engine_l
engine_r
engine_both
engine_start
gear_up
gear_down

Joystick use

I wanted to map a button on my joystick to the global hotkey for re-centering opentrack. The script joystick.py will help you accomplish this. For an event like:

time 1630135360.633106, type 3 (EV_KEY), code 17 (BTN_TOP), value 1

create a mapping like:

BTN_TOP,1,F11

The event type (e.g. EV_KEY or EV_ABS) is ignored in this case. Then pass this mapping to joystick.py as above, e.g. python joystick.py --mapping joy.csv --device /dev/input/event3