I don't know if this is at all possible, but is there any way to craft a plugin that would be able to call the x52output program to send text to the MFD on my X52?

What I'm hoping for here is to be able to throw target, faction, or system scan info onto the MFD. I was also thinking it'd be useful to make the LEDs brighten/dim based on events in the game.

We don't currently have read/write access in Lua to the degree you need -- you will probably require an external-to-VO script.

If you want to send me an X52 I will happily hack it up and send you the scripts (and I'm sure I'm not the only one) =)

I would love for everyone that wants one of these to have one. Sadly, I'm of limited financial means, which provide me with few opportunities (well, no opportunities, really) to send strangers free joysticks. I don't know how some of you play as well as you do with mouse/keyboard. Extra fingers, I guess.

How does one go about interfacing with VO to extract the information I need? (and is this allowed?)

I really just want selections from system scan, and maybe the data from mission text (destination sectors). I was thinking it might be fun to have the LEDs brighten whenever the proximity alarm goes off, too . . . but I haven't got a clue as to how I'd get that info from the game.

Thanks for the responses!

You can extract all (or at least most, and it is allowed as long as you don't do so for nefarious purposes) data you need from VO using lua, that's the easy part. The hard part is getting that data to the stick, which would require you to write a linux driver (or at the least a script that interfaces with the existing driver if it already does what you need) and scripts that get the VO lua scripts talking with the driver scripts.

You can find info on lua (and VO specific lua functions) at http://vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/9/17343 and http://www.vo-wiki.com/racecar/index.php?title=Main_Page respectively.

As for the linux driver-side stuff, I'm assuming this is a standard USB HID compliant device, try http://frogmouth.net/hid-doco/c100.html
There's lots of other HID related documentation out there, just google for it ;) Although I'm really not sure about the LED panel on that stick, so you may be on your own in reverse engineering it :(

you could do something similar to what I did with my bot.
have a small server running next to the game and send it commands with a script. the server then runs x52output with parameters depending on the command.

Looks like I've got some reading to do - thanks for the pointers!