I don’t think anyone else asked, and I forgot to… did you disable the power management feature on your USB controllers / hubs? I’m going to guess no, because unless you know this can be a problem then you probably weren’t even aware of it.
Basically, by default, Windows can turn off a USB device for power-saving reasons if it thinks it is not currently in use. The device should be able to handle this and should simply transparently reconnect when it’s being used again, but this doesn’t always work on the software side.
In the past, this has resulted in devices spontaneously disconnecting in flight and failing to reconnect for me. It’s a common enough problem that Spad.neXt actually detects it and can automatically fix it for you. MSFS usually handles it fine, but possibly in the case of the pedals it is not doing so.
Fixing this manually is a bit time-consuming and user-unfriendly, but here’s how you do it:
- Open Device Manager
- Find the ‘Universal Serial Bus controllers’ node in the list, and expand it. You’ll see several USB controllers listed (your MB will have more than one)
- For each of them, right-click and open ‘properties’
- If you have a ‘power management’ tab, go to it (not all controllers / devices have this feature)
- Uncheck the box that says ‘allow the computer to turn off this device to save power’
When you have found and changed all of these, your USB devices will no longer sleep. This may fix the problem. But OTOH you may just have a faulty set of pedals. If you’ve already sent them back then you won’t be able to try this solution until they are returned.
Also, check your power plan. For a desktop PC used for simming, you should have the Performance plan selected or create a custom one. If you have Balanced or power-saving, then you may get undesirable effects.