Saitek Trim Wheel causing need for Hard PC reset

[Rob Ainscough]

Problem: Any attempt to assign Elevator Trim causes P3D to become unresponsive and beep on mouse movement.

Primary PC
CPU: 5960X 16GB @ 3000Mhz
SSD: Samsung 850
GPU: 2 Titan X (not in SLI - single GPU used - 358.50)
Device: Saitek Trim Wheel
OS: Win7 64bit

Steps to replicate:
1. Install Saitek Trim wheel and verify operation in Setup USB Game controllers
2. Run P3D V3
3. Menu | Options | Controls | Axes tab
4. Select the Saitek Trim Wheel
5. Attempt to assign the Saitek Trim Wheel to "Elevator Trim" - move the wheel when dialog opens waiting for input

Results: nothing happens, axis not recognized and the dialog box waiting for axes input closes, and this point the mouse will beep and move VERY slowly. The only way out of this situation is a hard PC RESET (reboot).

[Ros5co]

Interesting find Rob.

I've been getting these lock ups & haven't been able to find the cause.

I have the trim wheel installed through FSUIPC but don't actually use it that often particularly if electric trim is available in the aircraft.

Will test shortly & report back.

[Ros5co]

Looks like you are right Rob.

The trim wheel seems to remain dormant till moved upon which time it becomes active. Hence it not interfering most of the time unless I bump it or it springs to life by itself somehow.

I started the sim three times, the first time I waited til in a previous flight then activated with a lock up.

Second time it didn't lock up so I thought maybe I had activated it prior to entering the sim & it would work OK if done.

Third time I again waited till I was in the sim then activated. Again the lock up.

Fourth time I thought I'd try activating prior to starting P3D. This I did & now I am unable to enter any flights. The sim starts OK however does not respond beyond that, to make things worse the sim no longer gets past the opening scenario page even following a Windows restart.

Looks like the sim is now borked requiring a reinstall. I'll try just reinstalling the client first & hopefully that will get me up & running.

What a bugger!!

Edit: After several attempts finally got the sim working again. Not sure if I'm game to test it any further! LOL

Edit2: Couldn't help myself. Used the trim wheel again & got the lock up, so it's now disabled till this gets sorted.

[WarpD]

Good catch Rob. I can confirm... the trim wheel causes the lockup and the beeping.

[Rob Ainscough]

Phew, glad I'm not on an Island on this one :)

Thanks for checking.

Cheers, Rob.

EDIT: I now have the Saitek Trim Wheel unplugged, no issues so far.

[Ros5co]

I disabled mine through devices so I can use it in the other two sims V2 & FSX.

Seems to have done the trick.

[Clifton Crane]

Hello,

Thanks for narrowing down this issue! We have opened a ticket to address it.

[Rob Ainscough]

Appreciate it Clifton.

Cheers, Rob.

[Clifton Crane]

Hello,

I have only been able to reproduce this issue once. I have read on other forums that the issue has been seen before with other applications when using the Saitek drivers. Do you guys have the Saitek Trim Wheel drivers installed or are you using the drivers provided with Windows?

Thanks!

[WarpD]

I am using Saitek driver 7.0.7.0 dated 03/07/2011

[Rob Ainscough]

Hi Clifton,

I'm using the Windows7 64 bit drivers ... no Saitek drivers installed.

One issue with the Saitek Trim Wheel is that it does NOT seem to be "active" all the time (not talking USB sleep mode, just not active) ... if I bring up the Windows 7 game controller, it shows my Trim Wheel in the list, when I select it the calibration screen will show NO red bar ... I have to move the wheel up/down several times then the Win7 calibration screen sees it and I get the red bar that moves up/down with wheel motion.

Others have reported that once you get the wheel to be correctly recognized by the OS, then it will work in V3. In my case, that doesn't happen, any attempt to use, even when I've got the OS to recognize it, will result in the beeps and slow mouse beeping and ultimately a hard reset of the PC.

In V2.5, if the Trim wheel was not recognized I could get it to work while in V2.5 by either moving the wheel back and forth OR unplug the wheel from side of Yoke (USB port) and then plug it back it.

V3 does NOT like me doing the same process I used in V2.5, any attempt at trying to plug in/out the trim wheel or move the wheel will result in the beeping and ultimately a hard reset of PC.

I'll admit, the way the Saitek Trim Wheel interacts with Win7 64bit does seem odd to me ... as if it's in some suspended mode ... and I have check all my power management setting, none of my device are set to go into sleep mode.

I have attempted to contact Saitek but I got the standard blow-off line response "we'll look into it" (that was a couple of months ago).

Cheers, Rob.

[aeronauta]

That was a problem I had when I started using W10, no solution , in my case after "activating" the wheel ( usb recognized) all would work , a USB disconnect would cause the mouse problem, ( Saitek devices still cause that) , but as I have the Saitek Yoke , one day I connected the wheel to the Saitek Hub and , voila all is OK... no other hub will do it.

Jorge

PS Had forgoten about it...

[pmb]

My Trim wheel is working (nearly) perfectly under Win10 + P3D3. I de-installed the Saitek drivers (actually all of them except the FIPs drivers) and use just what Win10 offers. No issues with hot-unplugging anymore.

"Nearly" because I have to turn the weel to get it detected after a reboot. Otherwise it will be detected during first use in simulator causing an unpredictable jump of the plane. This is still better than with the Saitek drivers where it was not detected in-simulator if I didn't turn it before starting the simulator.

Kind regards, Michael

[flamer]

I had this same issue too, it took a few days to figure out it was the trimwheel as the cause. Beeping and freezing up and even taskmanager would not kill it.

Anyways good news is I managed to fix it and now its working perfectly, bad news I don't entirely remember what I did.

I definitely did the following though:
1) uninstalled saitek trimwheel drivers from control panel
2) re-installed spad, realised spad alone wasn't driving the wheel so reinstalled latest driver from saitek (leaving spad on system aswell)
3) disabled "enable controllers" in p3d
4) copied fsuipc config from my 2.5 version to my v3. which included a trimwheel lua file.

Everything works fine never had another crash and trim works well other than like always takes a few whirls to get recognised.

happy to provide fsuipc config and lua file if anyone thinks it will help.

[roger-wilco-66]

Thanks for digging into that, this has also been bugging me for a few days now. The most unnerving aspect was that the error situation, that emerged in P3DV3, messed up the system so badly that it needed a hard reset. I found no way to recover the situation and get it to work normal again.

After disconnecting the wheel permanently everything was back to normal.

I'll try the FSUIPC route tonight!

Cheers,
Mark