I'm in the process of designing/building some basic panels for interfacing with flight sims, using an Arduino. I'm starting off by creating a POC based around autopilot heading select. I've got the basics working for displaying data on a 7-segment display and setting values from a rotary encoder.
My question is for anyone who has done something similar - do I need (and do sims generally support) read&write for this type of data (heading, altitude, radio frequency etc.) i.e. so that changes made directly in the sim itself can be reflected on external hardware. - or do people usually build it as a pure input device?
Details of what's available in MSFS2020 regarding API integrations aren't available yet (as far as I can tell), but i'm wondering what's usually expected within the hobby as it's not an area i've touched on much before. If read/write is an option, i'll presumably need to write an external app to handle the variables updating.
