Can I use my HOTAS or flight stick on Android TV?

A flight sim wants the big screen, and the big screen is the TV. But a HOTAS has more axes than any gamepad: stick, twist, throttle, rotaries, a hat or two, dozens of buttons. Remote-play apps translate that into an Xbox controller and lose most of it on the way.

You end up with a stick that steers like a thumbstick, a throttle that is not there, and a sim that refuses to bind half the buttons because it never sees them.

Moving the PC next to the TV solves it and creates a worse problem for everything else you do with it.

Sims bind controls by device: they talk to the stick’s own driver and expect its exact axes and button map. A streaming client that reads the HOTAS as a generic gamepad on the Android side and presents an emulated pad on the PC breaks the map before the sim even loads.

The only way to keep the map is to forward the USB device itself so that Windows enumerates it — the same device, the same driver, the same axes — as if it were plugged into the PC. That is USB-over-IP, and it is what the ChimpDeck app does with anything you plug into the TV box.

1. 01

   Plug the stick and throttle into the TV box

   USB into the Shield or Android TV box running ChimpDeck. USB OTG is the only requirement, no root, no ADB. A HOTAS with its own power supply plugs straight into a box with a full-size USB port; on most phones it needs a powered USB OTG hub, and a charge-only cable shows nothing. Several USB devices at once are listed and forwarded with filters and nicknames.

2. 02

   Let Windows enumerate them

   The USB bridge driver, signed by Microsoft and installed with ChimpDeck for Windows, makes Windows see the exact devices with their manufacturer drivers, configurators and profiles.

3. 03

   Check every axis in the test bench

   On the PC, ChimpDeck’s test bench shows raw axes and buttons; on the box, the button tester shows every button including undocumented bits, and the drift tool works on the stick’s axes too.

4. 04

   Bind in the sim as usual

   The sim sees the same device it would see locally, so your existing bindings and profiles apply. If a game still does not see it, this is why and what to check.

5. 05

   Stream the sim to the TV

   Pair the box with the PC without a PIN and pick the sim. The PC renders at the TV’s exact resolution and the rest of the TV setup is the usual one.

• Every axis, hat and button

  The device arrives whole: stick, twist, throttle, rotaries and all the buttons, as the driver defines them.

• Manufacturer software still works

  Configurators, profiles and lighting tools run on the PC because the device is really there.

• No cable across the house

  The HOTAS is on the desk in front of the TV; the PC can be anywhere on the network.

• Works without streaming too

  Sit at the monitor with the stick plugged into a phone or box: the bridge is a product on its own.