I am currently trying to use my old CH Yoke, Pro Pedals, and Throttle Quadrant. Most days the Yoke and Pedals work just fine but the Throttle always just works weirdly. It is like no matter what I do I cannot get it to work linearly. It always seems like I have no control of the throttle and is either on or off. I can get in a plane it even with the throttle all the way back in the sim it is at 35-85%. Get in a twin engine and while the RS throttle works, the LS won’t go below 45%. All controllers are Calibrated in Windows, only Alierons and Elevator have Sensitivity changed from “0”, no Deadzones at all. Although I am not sure, I may have ran across a reason for all the weirdness and that is that all my CH stuff was bought way back in 2002 or 2003, or somewhere around there. As such they are all USB 2.0 devices. ALL the USB ports on my PC are USB 3.0 or 3.1. The motherboard does have 2 USB 2.0 connectors but my case front ports are USB 3.0 and won’t connect to them. The 7 USB ports on the back are all 3.0 or 3.1. I did order a front panel today that has 4 USB 2.0 Ports and will install it when it’s delivered on Friday, so I won’t know anything until then. I am just really getting flustered in trying to fly when you never know from one flight to the next if things are going to go wonky.
I have a Honycomb Alpha that should be here by the end of the month but the Bravo Quadrant could be held up until January of February before I see that, so I really hope that this is a fix.
I had a terrible time with my CH throttle until I installed the CH Control Center. I have to run the CH program to activate my Pro Pedals and the program allowed all the numbered switches to appear in FS. Try it out, it may solve your issue. http://www.chproducts.com/13-29170-Downloads-and-Community.php.html
I tried that awhile back but had some issues so deleted it. But I didn’t try to do the Combo setup so that may be where I went wrong. I will give it a try again.
CH Control Center/Manager has issues with Windows 10 and is not currently recommended per feedback from CH Products. The person at CH who wrote it retired and no further updates are planned. The controllers show up fine in Windows as standard DirectInput controllers with built in Windows drivers.
I have a set of CH stick/yoke/pedals purchased in 2013. They are very sensitive to the voltage of the USB ports causing ‘jitter’ in the raw axes readouts. I put all 3 items on a dedicated USB hub with it’s own power input and the jitter was reduced from a huge almost unuseable level (large visible motion of control surfaces of the aircraft constantly) to a tiny +/-1 amount (no visible motion of control surfaces in sim)
I have had some issues with the throttle not wanting to go all the way to 100% and sometimes reading in weird ‘steps’. Typically moving it back and forth through the entire range clears this up. I suspect some dust got into it during many years of not being used.
There are physical potentiometers inside the devices that can wear or collect dust/debris with age, so I would strongly recommend a good check in the Windows Joystick Control Panel.
I also as a practice give all the controls a complete 'wiggle" while looking at the external view prior to takeoff, including the throttle.
There are some joystick sensitivity adjustment and scripting utilities that work on any joystick that can replace the advanced features of CH Control Manager.
Am using the CH Throttle and Fighter Stick. Works as expected except for the throttle slider. My workaround is to assign the planes increase and decrease throttle keys to the side hat on the CH Throttle. Works fine as long as your fingers don’t wear out. As for the CH Control Panel, it is a no go for me. Crashes FS 2020. Without the Control Manager I only get one assignment rather than three per switch etc. My CH products are of the older variety.
The CH Control Manager v4.55a did not work for me under Windows 10. After opening it always crashed. I was annoyed about this for a long time. This helped, since then it works without problems:
go to the device manager
expand the category CH Products
clear/disable for all CH devices, where it is possible the Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power check box
Restart the computer
That had helped with me. Now I can open the CH Control Manager under Windows 10 without crashing and calibrate and configure my CH Fighterstick, Pro Throttle & Pro Pedals.
I’m glad that worked for you, but the CH Manager does low level USB stuff that can conflict with things like the RGB LED control software for new motherboards (often a USB device) etc. And CH themselves recommends not to use it anymore in Windows 10, in direct response to questions at the release of MSFS.
I hate to see someone about to install something that is highly likely to make their situation worse.
‘Joystick Gremlin’ has pretty much all of the features that the CH software offered but is actually maintained by its author.
Make sure that you have that CH Throttle assigned/bound only to THROTTLE AXIS in the sim. There are a lot of different throttle options, including for specific engines, as well as buttons. Based on your description I think you have it bound to either a button combo OR to a specific throttle axis for one engine.
If you have it bound to the single axis setting you should see in the settings if you get smooth movement across the range. If not, then as suggested it could be a noisy potentiometer… which could be resolved but you will need to take it apart.
USB 2 vs 3 shouldn’t matter. I have an old Sidewinder with a throttle axis that is from the same era as the CH throttle, and it’s fine. Originally though first time I jumped in a twin, I had only one engine controllable because I had it bound to the wrong setting.
I do not let CH-Manager start with Windows. I just calibrated all my CH devices and set up a deathzone on the mouse stick of the throttle. For further use of the hardware the manager is not needed anymore.
CH Manager includes with it custom CH drivers which ‘hide’ the real physical USB devices and then create new virtual devices.
In ‘passthrough’ mode it creates 3 new virtual devices with the same names as the original physical devices but calibration done in the CH Manager software.
In ‘mapped’ mode it does all the complicated macro mapping stuff and creates whatever complicate of virtual devices you want that (if you can even get mapped mode to work in Win10)
Even if you’re not allowing the control manager to run, those drivers are still getting loaded, and could possibly interfere with other USB devices or cause problems. This may not be the same for everyone depending on what is installed in their system.
I have had no problems with my CH devices since Windows 10 release. As long as everything (DCS, MFS, IL2, Falcon4BMS) runs without problems, I leave everything as usual. If there should be any problems with the CH devices (driver crash, bluescreens, ghosting, error in the windows 10 event viewer), I will change something. Until then … never touch a running system.
Throttles are assigned correctly, Throttle Axis 1 and Throttle Axis 2. Same with Mixture and Prop. I have tried hooking all 3 to a powered hub and got even more weirdness it seemed. Only thing I haven’t tried is deleting the Throttle commands on the keyboard but don’t see how there can be a conflict there. I have checked to make sure of assignments, that is how I know about Engine 1 being screwed up while 2 seems fine. I have read quite a few threads here about the Throttle Quad not liking USB 3.0 is why I am looking at that. I will have to get back to it tomorrow as don’t have time tonight. I am going to try just using the sticks on the Yoke and not use the Quadrant at all. But that won’t work once the Alpha Yoke arrives and I am not going to hold my breath waiting on the Bravo Quadrant to get here.
[edit] Just for an FYI. Looking at all the axises in the Game Controller applet in Windows, I do not see any jumping or any kind of weirdness. Everything works smoothly, like it should.
I use my nearly 20 year old CH Flight Sim Yoke (USB) and CH Pro Pedals (joystick port with cheap joystick to USB converter). Works perfectly. No additional software needed. Win 10 recognizes both devices as game controllers, which I can then freely configure to my desires.
(Even though recently, some buttons stopped working on the CH yoke. Probably a broken wire. Need to test for continuity and replace the defective wire.)
My Yoke and Pedals work fine also. My problems are all with the Throttle Quadrant. That is what I am trying to solve. And it is the newest of the 3, though not by much.
A bit of an update. I had noticed that the throttles were only showing 50% movement in the Controls Menu, only 50% was lighting up. I have read somewhere about the 2 left levers on the quadrant are different in how the axis are implemented from the other 4. I moved the Throttle to the 2 middle levers and now both throttles work as they should and are linear. I have no idea what it will do to Mixture though, but I guess I can always just enable auto-mixture
Just an update, I installed the USB 2.0 panel and finally did my 1st flights. All controls are much better and the Throttle Quadrant is back to acting normally with the correct levers assigned like they should be. And I can finally get an airplane trimmed out for level flight without having to resort to AP. So I am going to say that in my situation with my 3 CH devices, going to USB 2.0 did solve my issues. YMMV.
