This project provides a physical box that can give the functionality of an Autopilot for X Plane.
The device has 4 line of 20 char LCD display, 4 rotary encoders, 12 buttons and 12 LEDs.
The processor is an ESP8266-01 using 3 MC23017 for port expansion.
Se the complete description and original building instruction here. OBS: the configuration section is now changed.
In my oppinion, the ESP8266 is highly underestimated. It has the processing power, the speed, the flashram and ram to do much more than the sots of small IOT applicaton seen on the net.
In this project, I use an ESP8266-01 with only 2 ports available. these ports are used for I2C connection to 3 MCP25017, giving 48 available ports.
These 48 ports handles the LCD display, 12 buttons, 12 LED's and 4 encoders with four switches.
The program is quite demanding as it has to handle many UDP-trabsactions per second and at the same time process encoders, buttons and LED's.