STECS virtual devices help needed

[Rwin]

Hello all!

Last year october, I ordered and received a STECS Max. I play Elite Dangerous on linux, so like all others, I had to circumvent the 32 button per device limitation somehow. At first, I used vkbdevcfg to configure button-to-keyboard shortcuts with great succes. That was until the KDE neon developers decided (to their full right) to choose a new keyboard shortcut which conflicted with one of my STECS mappings. Last month, I decided to try out the virtual devices approach as described by fallout9 here: https://www.reddit.com/r/hotas/comments ... ?rdt=57248.

As described, I set the number of buttons setting to 32 and VC number to 2:

The result looked promising, since I did see a 32 button split for 3 devices at the Buttons/POVS screen and I could see button presses light up on the different virtual devices:

However, Elite Dangerous fails to register any button above #32 so that's quite a few for the STECS Max
Then I checked the logical layer in vkbdevcfg and noticed that any button above 32 shows up with errors:

I updated firmware somewhere in january to version 2.165.

I must be missing something and I hope that anyone here can push me back in the right direction.

PS: I avoid Windows like the plague, so I'm hoping there is a vkbdevcfg version available for linux somewhere. If there is one, can you share? If not... consider this a feature request

Looking forward to your insights,
Cmdr Rwin
o7

[Ron61]

You have divided 128 buttons into 3, but you need 4. Put 3 here and get four devices with 32 buttons each.

[Rwin]

Thanks, I'll give that a try hopefully this evening!
However, setting up 'just' 96 buttons should still give some kind of response on those 96 buttons but Elite Dangerous only recognizes the first 32. To put that to the test, I'll give Windows a try to see if it's a linux device recognition kind of thing. In addition, I'm curious what happens on a flight simulator game with modern code.

[Rwin]

My journey so far:

I tested Elite Dangerous with WIndows and it worked instantly (to my frustration lol). On linux I keep getting some issues, but I'm making progress. The steps I have taken so far:

1) Notify grub about virtual devices

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vim /etc/default/grub and adjust the following line:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash usbhid.quirks=0x231d:0x012e:0x040" <-- The first 2 blocks of usbhid.quirks will depend on your product, run lsusb to get them for your device.
update-grub
update-initramfs -c -k 'all' -v
reboot

2) Verify OS detection of virtual devices

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dmesg | grep -i 012e
[    0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-6.5.0-21-generic root=UUID=e819d9fb-fddb-4121-8144-884fe9ddab28 ro quiet splash usbhid.quirks=0x231d:0x012e:0x040 vt.handoff=7
[    0.024567] Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-6.5.0-21-generic root=UUID=e819d9fb-fddb-4121-8144-884fe9ddab28 ro quiet splash usbhid.quirks=0x231d:0x012e:0x040 vt.handoff=7
[    6.341630] usb 3-9: New USB device found, idVendor=231d, idProduct=012e, bcdDevice=21.79
[    6.366933] input: VKB-Sim (C) Alex Oz 2023 S-TECS MODERN THROTTLE MAX STEM  as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.1/0000:04:00.0/0000:05:0c.0/0000:17:00.0/usb3/3-9/3-9:1.0/0003:231D:012E.000A/input/input18
[    6.367029] input: VKB-Sim (C) Alex Oz 2023 S-TECS MODERN THROTTLE MAX STEM  as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.1/0000:04:00.0/0000:05:0c.0/0000:17:00.0/usb3/3-9/3-9:1.0/0003:231D:012E.000A/input/input22
[    6.367081] input: VKB-Sim (C) Alex Oz 2023 S-TECS MODERN THROTTLE MAX STEM  as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.1/0000:04:00.0/0000:05:0c.0/0000:17:00.0/usb3/3-9/3-9:1.0/0003:231D:012E.000A/input/input23
[    6.367154] hid-generic 0003:231D:012E.000A: input,hidraw9: USB HID v1.11 Joystick [VKB-Sim (C) Alex Oz 2023 S-TECS MODERN THROTTLE MAX STEM ] on usb-0000:17:00.0-9/input0

Not looking bad I thought! 3 input devices is what I would expect.

3) Install new firmware
At this point I looked around the forum and stumbled upon a similar thread: viewtopic.php?f=25&t=7928 which suggests to install newer firmware. The firmware can be gotten here: https://mega.nz/folder/049kRJRY#Gi6V2poN5T3pRbJwGN4x8g. It looked semi legit at first, but the posting user Delta seems to have a good reputation and knows what he is doing, so install galore!
And now I run firmware version 2.17.9. One thing I noticed instantly was that the red error messages at the logical layer disappeared so that seemed promising!

4) Test the inputs with jstest.
After verifying dmesg again, I went ahead and tested the STECS buttons.

All buttons tested ok and showed up on their corresponding virtual device.

5) Cleanup the Elite Dangerous wine registry
Because I did several tests with STECS virtual devices, the registry was clodded with old references.

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WINEPREFIX="/<Path to SteamLibrary>/steamapps/compatdata/359320/pfx"
regedit

The registry editor pops up. For me, this is how it looks like after cleaning up and then rebooting + starting up steam again:

Later, I got rid of any and all references to 012e, but that caused steam to identify the entire Elite Dangerous directory as corrupt and started downloading 27 Gb... It got my clean registry though

6) Test, despair and start doing something useful like playing Satisfactory.
After all the above, I thought I had all the right cards to start setting up my Elite Dangerous button bindings but alas. The behaviour is unchanged, meaning only the first 32 buttons are registered by Elite Dangerous, all virtual device buttons are not coming through.

I feel like I'm aaaaaalmost there, does anyone have any insights on how to complete my journey and send me into the void again?
My gut feeling tells me this has got something to do with the virtual devices registering under the same name and/or hardware id which confuses either Proton or Elite Dangerous.

o7

[Rwin]

"All work and no flying makes cmdr Rwin a dull boy"

No dice so far, so I'll revert back to the keyboard mappings.
If a wizard happens to wander by this thread, feel free to enter your solution here and I may revisit virtual devices

Cmdr Rwin out