Sticklink

Live stick and telemetry overlays for OBS, straight from your radio. Sticklink reads your sticks, switches and link telemetry from an EdgeTX radio (tested on a RadioMaster Pocket) over USB, serves them as an OBS Browser Source with the same look as stickcam's after-the-fact overlays, and records every session so you can check and reuse the data later.

What you get

• Effects overlay (/fx): eight styles (Clean, Minimal, Neon, Arcade, Synthwave, Inferno, Unicorn, Hacker) with glowing trails, sparks, shockwaves and live throttle timers. Trails are smooth curves with no added delay.
• Telemetry HUD (/hud): Link, Battery, GPS and Status blocks as badges, in the same eight styles. GPS shows a live map with your track, home marker and distance. Each block is also its own page (/hud/link, /hud/battery, /hud/gps), so you can put them in OBS as separate sources. It shows what your radio really receives (see limits).
• Receiver setup page (/setup): a live 3D quad, stick bars and a 16-channel monitor, like Betaflight Configurator's receiver tab. Press Learn and move a stick or switch to assign roll, pitch, yaw, throttle, ARM and Crash Flip, so a swapped or reversed stick is a ten-second fix.
• Double-click to configure: style, effect strength, size and video delay, saved on the server so an OBS source updates by itself. The panel also shows a permanent link for the current look: use it as a source's URL to pin that source to its own configuration.
• Scene switching (/modes): a Betaflight-style Modes page for your OBS scenes: give each scene ranges on a switch channel, sort them so the upper scene wins, and OBS follows your switches (via OBS's built-in WebSocket). Off until you turn it on, and it never acts on stale radio data.
• Recordings: one JSONL file per session, a check-log quality report (rate, gaps, lost records, channel ranges) and replay to play a session back through the overlay.
• REST API + Swagger UI (/docs, works offline) and a WebSocket stream for your own tools.
• No dependencies to install: downloads are single self-contained programs for Linux, Windows and macOS (they carry their own Python). A pip-installable Python package is available too.

Quick start

1. Download the build for your system from the Releases page, and unpack it. 1b. Prefer a window? Start the program with no arguments (double-click it): pick your radio (or Demo), press Start, and use the buttons to open the pages. Same as sticklink gui.
2. Try it without a radio:

   ./sticklink run --demo          # Windows: sticklink.exe run --demo
   

   Open http://127.0.0.1:8765/fx. You should see two gimbals moving by themselves.
3. Connect your radio: install the script and set USB-VCP to LUA (radio setup), then

   ./sticklink list-ports
   ./sticklink run --port /dev/ttyACM0 --input-label sticks     # Windows: --port COM5
   

4. Assign your sticks and switches at http://127.0.0.1:8765/setup (press Learn, move the control).
5. Add it to OBS as a Browser Source with the URL http://127.0.0.1:8765/fx, size 576x450, 60 fps (OBS setup). Double-click the page (in OBS: right-click, Interact) to change the look.

Prefer Python? Once published on PyPI: uvx sticklink run --demo (no install, needs uv) or pip install sticklink. Or pip install sticklink-<version>-py3-none-any.whl (from the release page), or from a checkout pip install .; then run sticklink ....

Pages and commands

More in docs/cli.md.

Documentation

Status and honest limits

• Verified on real hardware: a RadioMaster Pocket (EdgeTX 2.10) with ExpressLRS, on Linux, with OBS 32. The radio reports sticks at about 20 Hz (EdgeTX runs function scripts every 50 ms); the overlay smooths between readings.
• The Windows and macOS builds are produced and smoke-tested by CI (unit tests, integration tests and a run of the frozen program), but they have not been tried with a radio on those systems yet.
• The HUD shows only telemetry your radio actually receives. Betaflight does not send motor outputs, RPM, PID or gyro over the radio link (those live in the blackbox on the quad), so there is no live motor screen. So far only link quality (RQly) has been seen live on a real radio; the other link sensors, battery, GPS and attitude were tested with simulated data until the radio script is updated and the quad sends them.
• The GPS map downloads tiles from the internet (OpenStreetMap by default); see overlay guide.
• The effects overlay shows what sticks and switches can drive: trails, sparks, snaps, punch-outs, full-throttle and hang-time timers, arm/disarm. Flips, rolls and crash detection in stickcam need gyro and accelerometer data that the radio does not have.
• Sticklink only reads from the radio. It never writes to it and never changes ExpressLRS or model settings.
• Unsigned downloads: macOS Gatekeeper and Windows SmartScreen will warn once (getting started).

Licence

No licence has been chosen yet, so all rights are reserved. Third-party components are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.