MobiFlight PCB Designs

The philosophy of MobiFlight is to use readily available, affordable modules, enabling as many people as possible to build a home cockpit. With that in mind, we have created some "helper" circuit boards in the community. While these can be useful, generic modules are often the most economical way to get started and to expland your setup, as mass production of those learning modules enables pricing that are hard to match with a niche variant like one designed for home cockpit building only.

Thus, while some of these are no doubt useful, we should not get too carried away with reinventing the "sim cards" of the past. Arduino Mega still will get you far, but if you are doing analog panels with stepper motors, for example, sometimes a stepper motor wiring "shield" can make life easier. So there is this balance to be mindful of.

Wiring best practices

To potentially help the community create compatible designs that can be reused by others, there are some basic practices that might be useful. These are by no means perfect and are just documented here in case someone is wondering how to plan interfacing something else with these boards, for example.

Since JST-XH connectors have 2.54mm pin distance, they are easy to solder by hand even if you are not super experienced, and they are readily available and also fit a male pin header if you are desprate, we thought we'll use them. The pin order is counted as follows:

Input devices

Input devices	Connector	pins	1	2	3	4	5	6
Button	JST-XH	2	GND	Data
Encoder	JST-XH	3	DataA	GND	DataB
Potentiometer	JST-XH	3	GND	Data	VCC
Shifter IN	JST-XH	5	GND	VCC	Latch	Clock	Data
Multiplexer Chain	JST-XH	6	GND	VCC	S0	S1	S2	S3
Multiplexer Data	JST-XH	2	GND	Data

Output devices

Output devices	Connector	pins	1	2	3	4	5	6
Led	JST-XH	2	GND	Data
Stepper	JST-XH	6	GND	VCC	Data1	Data2	Data3	Data4
Servo	JST-XH	3	GND	VCC	Data
LCD	JST-XH	4	GND	VCC	SDA	SCL
Shifter OUT	JST-XH	5	GND	VCC	Latch	Clock	Data