Hardware: steering wheel and pedals?

[eckzow]

Whew, active community. That's refreshing... anyway, sorry I haven't been keeping up as well, but I was at work all day and I forgot to change my password to something I knew last night so I couldn't log in until I got home..

Let's take these one at a time.

I guess you mean only in linux?

Yes, I meant the default 200 degree set points that the wheel initializes to when it is enumerated. After getting the basic force feedback utils working I can confirm that they work on the wheel (ffcfstress, etc.). I didn't notice any particular problems with them, not even the "force feedback stopped working after a while" problem I've seen posted in a few other places.

eckzow, hi and welcome. I haven't got a G25 so I'm not sure what the problems with it are in Linux, or how exactly to solve them. I'm guessing that since the previously available Logitech wheels had less features, that the new one is limited by the driver capabilities. It sounds like someone needs to see just how it works in Windows, probably spy on the USB traffic some, and use this data to improve the Linux driver. If I had one of these wheels I'd be doing just that...but I can't afford one. So I hope someone does this before they become cheap, because I will certainly get one when that happens...

Hi, and thanks! I happen to have the good fortune of access to a G25 wheel for the foreseeable future and probably a few good hours a day to play with it. I've finally gotten out of the "find someone to do it for me mode" so I'll start the reverse engineering process to find out how the bad boy works.

The problem with G25 is exactly that: it has more features:
-900º of steering, instead of the usual 200+º.
-Heaps of buttons, including an 8-way hat.
-An H-shifter with 7 regular gear positions (6+1) + neutral (=="no gear").
-A switch so that the H-shifter physically behaves like a rally car sequential shifter (only up-down movement).

Yeah, I guess I was hoping that the USB-HID protocol was abstract enough that most of those things (like the extra axes, etc.) would be handled in stride. Naive, eh?

So far things aren't too bad though: something in the fftest demos changes the steering calibration, so that's a starting point. Most of the heaps of buttons are handled by standard HID stuff, the exceptions being the shifter (first and second work, but the others do not).

The H-shifter to sequential shifter switch doesn't seem that complicated. It seems to use the same "buttons" as the H shifter does for first and second. The one trick might be detecting which mode it is in, though.

The hat shows up as a set of axes, just like the d-pad on the logitech rumble joypad.

Most depressing is the clutch, which doesn't seem to show up anywhere I've seen so far.

All of the controls though, including a slew of force feedback effects (like wooden bridge, etc.) as well as things like configuring the wheel's set points (apparently anywhere from 40 to 900 degrees) are all available through the game controller configuration in Windows. I like this, because it means I'm not going to have to jump through hoops to get good I/O on this thing.

Anyway, I think this project is within my abilities, so I'll certainly give it a shot. I plan on familiarizing myself with the current drivers for the wheel this weekend and come the beginning start trying to reverse some protocol.

Wish me luck!