Saitek (which was later acquired my Logitech) created flight instrument hardware that is primarily associated with Microsoft Flight Simulator. While there are various device types that they make, the one in which I had the most interest is the “Flight Instrument Panel.” It is a small LCD display that connects to the computer via a USB connector. It doesn’t appear that Logitech has made any changes to the hardware since it’s release; the device still uses a mini-USB connector.

I have some purposes for it beyond using it for Microsoft Flight Simulator. I wanted to perform some customization on the pane. After going through the setup, the panel begin to display information. By default it displays promotional information for other hardware until an application tells it to display something else. I’m not fond of advertisements on my idle devices and wanted to change these first. Thankfully this can be done without any programming. The default displays images are from jpg files that can be found in the file system after the device is setup. Navigate to C:\Program Files\Logitech\DirectOutput to see the files. Replace any one of them to alter what the screen displays.

Before purchasing a panel I searched for an SDK for it. I didn’t find an SDK, but I found that plenty of other people had software projects for it and figured I would be able to make it work. Only after getting the device setup did I find that the SDK was closer than I realized. Documentation for controlling the panel installs along side the panel. The group of APIs in the SDK are referred to as DirectOutput. No, that’s not one of Microsoft’s DirectX APIs (Like Direct3D, DirectInput, so on). That’s just the name Saitek selected for their SDK.

1. The Application Directory
2. The System Directory
3. The Windows Directory
4. Current Directory
5. Directorys in the PATH environment variable

If the target DLL isn’t in one of those folders, it won’t be found. There is a Win32 function that let’s an application set an additional folder in which the system will look for resolving a DLL location at runtime. The function has the signature HRESULT SetDllDirectory(LPWSTR pathname). When this method is called with a valid path the new search path is as follows.

1. The Application Directory
2. The Directory passed in SetDllDirectory()
3. The System Directory
4. The Windows Directory
5. The Current Directory
6. Directories in the PATH environment variable

The statement for adding a declaration for SetDllDirectory follows.

[DllImport("kernel32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
static extern bool SetDllDirectory(string lpPathName);

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