HOW TO FIX YOUR LOGITECH G940 JOYSTICK First off,
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I've been putting off repairing my G940 until the warranty ran out. Well guess what? It's expired now! So the question is.. what's wrong with the G940? Two words: REVERSAL BUG. This is a known 'bug' in the joystick's logic and
Logitech is being a huge PITA about fixing it. From what I understand their engineers believe that this is a feature of the stick and NOT a bug. They call it 'hysteresis' and claim that it must exist.
Here's a quick run down:
Lets say you start at 0% throttle. As you slowly increase the throttle you would expect it to do the following:
0% 1% 2% 3% 4% 5% 6% 7% 8% 9% 10% 11% 12%
Easy enough to understand, right? OK lets say at this point you decide to slowly reduce your throttle. You'd expect to see this:
12% 11% 10% 9% 8% 7% 6% 5% 4% 3% 2% 1% 0%
Still with me here? OK Good.
Logitech has implemented a 'hysteresis' upon reversal of an axis to help compensate for something called 'pot jitter'. Have you ever slowly turned the volume knob on an old radio only to be scared silly by a loud SCRATCHING noise coming from the speakers? This is due to an extreme amount of jitter called 'spiking'. Joystick potentiometers are very similar and lower quality pots will do this under normal circumstances. Granted it's only a little bit but it can still happen.
Logitech decided to use firmware logic to slightly reduce the sensitivity when the direction is reversed. It's actually a brilliant solution and if properly implemented, if you were to slightly reduce your throttle you'd see this as you slowly move the lever:
12% 12% 12% 11% 10% 9% 8% 7% 6% 5% 4% 3% 2% 1% 0%
The problem is that it has NOT been properly implemented, and instead what you get is this:
12% 12% 12% 9% 8% 7% 6% 5% 4% 3% 2% 1% 0%
Do you see the difference? It registered no movement at first but then JUMPED to compensate for the physical travel. This makes fine-tuning things extremely difficult and the amount it jumps varies depending on the axis. It's about 3% for the rudders, 5% for the throttles and 3% to 4% on the trims. It also exists on the toe brake axes, the mini-stick axes and even the PRIMARY X and Y axes of the joystick itself! This is especially confusing considering the primary X and Y axes use hall effect sensors instead of potentiometers!
In December 2010
Logitech released a new firmware which greatly reduced the amount of hysteresis in the primary X and Y axes, reducing it from about 1.2% down to about 0.15%. Yes it's still there but to be fair it's almost impossible to notice while flying – even during precision maneuvers such as formation flying and dogfighting. The problem is that all of the other axes have just as much hysteresis as before! Not a single word has been heard about software/firmware development for the G940 since then and that was SIX MONTHS AGO! Time to take matters into my own hands now.
The whole idea of this modification is to leave the stick itself alone. While it may be possible, rewiring the stick's primary axes would result in loss of Force Feedback and that would defeat the purpose of it all. I could rewire the three trim knobs and the mini-stick on the main stick but I don't see a huge need to as none of those axes require precision.
Instead I rewired the seven axes of the throttle and rudders through a third-party controller board, leaving the buttons intact so that they can still be programmed through the
Logitech software. I chose Leo Bodnar's BU0836 controller board as it can handle up to 8 axes and a whole bunch of buttons. Maybe later I'll add some custom controls to the board but for now I'm only worried about the axes. I suppose you can use just about any stick's circuitry but I chose the BU0836 because of its easy to use layout and because I didn't feel like butchering an old stick just for its electronics.
The factory configuration of the G940 requires that the throttle and the rudders connect to the stick using 9 pin (DB9) serial cables. The stick then connects to your computer with a USB cable and a power supply is connected as well. The new configuration has the rudders connecting ONLY to the BU0836 controller board. The throttle is now connected to BOTH the BU0386 and the G940 joystick, and of course the Joystick itself has remained unchanged.
I spent about $10 at monoprice.com on some adapters to make the wiring go easier. Here's a picture of the adapters I bought:
On the left is a CAT5 connector I ended up not using. On the right is a DB9 (serial) to RJ45 (network) adapter of which I bought four of. A couple spares just in case. They were cheap and came in VERY HANDY!
The first thing I did was to remove the base of the throttle. There are eleven screws total so make sure you have a thin phillips-head screwdriver handy as the holes aren't very large:
Once the screws are all out you need to peel back half of the rubber feet – the halves with the holes in them. Be careful not to tear the rubber like I did:
Now you can remove the base but be careful here. You can open it up just far enough to get your hand in and undo the larger four-pin connector. This must be unplugged in order to get the base out of the way:
Once you have the base out of the way you will see this:
Here is a close-up of the circuit board. You will end up rewiring all four wires of the smaller four pin connector as well as four of the pins from the twelve pin connector as marked here:
On the base itself, there was plenty of room to install the RJ45 end of one of the adapters. I ended up cutting a rectangular hole in the base of the G940 throttle. I also ended up cutting off half of the adapter's housing (the part that accommodates the DB9 serial plug) as it's not needed here:
Next you have to extract four of the twelve wires from the twelve pin connector. I suppose you could just cut the wires but I wanted my operation to stay reasonably reversible just in case. You can release the wires by inserting a thin tool (in my case a small sewing needle did the trick). You have to insert it between the wire and the clip holding it in place. Then pry the clip back just enough to release the wire and slide it out. It's almost an operation that required three hands so if you have a friend handy it will go much easier:
Here is a blurry picture of the clips on the backside of the four pin connector. The clips on the twelve pin connector are exactly the same. Be careful not to bend it too much as it might break:
Here's a picture of the twelve pin connector with the wires extracted (and the connecter reattached):
I happened to have an old CD-ROM audio cable laying around and I noticed its small four pin connector was identical to what is used here, so I installed the four wires I extracted into that connector. This step isn't necessary but I thought it would keep things looking clean and relatively professional:
Next I found some solid network cabling and extracted the wires from it. I also extracted the pins from an old VGA cable I had laying around:
Then I soldered the pins to the wires:
Then I inserted the pins into the two four wire connectors and used some shrink wrap to make a harness in order to keep things neat, tight, and free of electrical shorts. I also took the time to install a zip tie to keep the wires that remained on the twelve pin connector from flexing. A hardware issue with these is that as you move the throttle the wires flex at the connector causing buttons to quit working intermittently and causing the trims to do crazy things. You want to keep enough slack on the wiring going up the throttles so that it isn't stretched at full throttle, but you want the wiring at the connector to not move at all while moving the throttle. This is where the zip tie comes in handy:
Here's another look at my harness except this time connected to my network connector. The female pins for the serial adapter worked out great as I was able to slide the stripped ends of the wires into them and crimp them tight. Then I heated it up with a solder iron and the solder flowed right into the slots on the sides of the pins keeping everything nice and secure:
I suppose that if I had planned it better I could have made something work that didn't require so much soldering but it's not a big deal. The biggest problem I have now is that if I take it back apart I have no easy place to simply unplug it but the network plug fits tight enough to not move while plugging in the cable, but loose enough so that I can push it out if I ever have to disassemble it again.
When reinstalling the base don't forget to reconnect the larger vertical four pin connector:
And here's a final shot of the rear of the throttle:
Once you get to this point you can connect the throttle back to the stick with the original serial cable (don't worry about the new connections just yet) and make sure all of the buttons still work. All of the axes will still be present, but will be 'stuck' at 50%.
The rudders themselves are much easier to modify. Since there are no circuit boards or processing chips involved you can simply tap into their 9 pin serial connector. Also the fact that there are no buttons on the Rudders makes things even more simple. No dis-assembly required! There are only five pins you need to access.
OK so you're thinking that this is all fine and dandy and all that, but “how do I know what wire goes to where?” I've created an easy to use chart for you. What type of wire you use and how you do it isn't so important as is making sure the right wire gets to the right connection. The wire colors of the chart are the same factory wire colors used in my G940.
The throttle trims (R1 and R2) use black, white, pink, and light blue wires. The throttles themselves use black, yellow, dark blue, and red wires. Make sure you don't confuse the black wire used for the trims (1) with the black wire used for the throttles (2). In case you haven't figured it out, “W” stands for “white”.
For the rudders, instead of colors I used pin-out numbers. I didn't feel like taking them apart just to get the wire colors:
Here's a picture of the BU0836 controller board. It's VERY tiny and comes with connectors. I found that soldering to the connectors proved to be a pain in the rear and I ended up using a USB motherboard connector and a speaker wire connector to make the rudder connections:
This is the BU0836 fully connected. Yes, it looks rough because I haven't purchased a project box for it just yet but I will soon. Mainly I wanted to get everything connected and make sure it works. You'll notice that my wire colors don't match that of the diagram but that is because the wiring that came with the adapters don't quite match up. What's important is that the proper wire gets to the proper terminal of the BU0836 board:
Here is a run-down of how it shows up in the device manager. This is Windows 7 but I see no reason why it wouldn't run on Vista or XP either. No drivers had to be installed. It's a simple matter of calibrating and you're good to go:
Last but not least here's a final diagram of how everything is now connected to each other after the modifications are complete:
The reversal bug is NOW GONE!
I hope you've enjoyed my write up! Feel free to contact me at thereisnospoon@ympsa.com if you have any questions!