CSR Elite Wheel - Reduced Rotation
Christian J
Member
A few days ago I decided I wanted to dust off my old Forza CSR Elite wheel and see what driving in VR feels like (spoiler: it's amazing). After updating the firmware to 757 and some frustration with drivers (144, 205, 261, even 289, which is newer than the last officially supported one for this wheel as far as I can tell) I sorta got it working. While I'm kinda weirded out by the general driver behavior/instability - newer versions seem to work less reliable and "kill" a USB port after "Initializing Device Control Panel" - I can actually use the wheel in games.
However, the wheel seems to somehow think its total available rotation is about ~330ish degrees instead of the 900 it's supposed to be. By that I mean the soft lock will kick in and the wheel will report 100% rotation once it reaches that point, just as if I had actually set the SEN setting to 330... but I have it at 900. If I reduce the SEN setting to say 450, then it will linearly scale down and rotate an actual 165 degrees. Setting the SEN to OFF and changing it via the Control Panel exhibits the same behavior.
Any idea what this could be or if it can be fixed somehow? Is this a hardware defect? The wheel can definitely still read rotation data outside of the soft-locked rotation, as I can "move" that 330 degree area freely throughout the 900 degree physical rotation by recentering the wheel at different points.
Note: running on Win 10, Version 20H2, if it matters. Though since the wheel also shows this behavior while not yet in PC mode I kinda doubt it's Windows/driver related...
Comments
Hi Christian,
I think this is one for our technical team - please create a support ticket via the My Products section of your Fanatec account. You may need to manually register your wheel first before you can see the 'support' button.
[Fanatec Community Manager]
Thanks, I've logged a support ticket yesterday, but actually requested closure of that today because I've managed to develop a workaround for my issue.
In case anyone's interested: while messing around with different driver versions, I noticed that after (re)installing a driver my wheel could temporarily (until I opened the control panel property page) turn slightly more than 330° when in SEN=OFF mode - about 390° to be exact. Being a software dev myself this seemed very suspicious, as that behavior very much looked like the SEN value not being initialized according to the wheel model's maximum and defaulting to 1080° instead. This implied that the SEN value is not sanity checked by the wheel firmware, which led me to develop an utility app that simply sends SEN values inflated by a factor of 2.75 to counteract the weirdly reduced rotation of my wheel. To my delight this appears to work perfectly fine!
Sure, I can't change the rotation angle on the fly using the wheel's interface, but that hardly matters for my purposes anyway, and considering how old and out-of-warranty my wheel is, that solution is more than sufficient 🙂
Hi, I have come across that exact same issue today after a long break not using my wheel. Would it be possible for you to maybe share your app?
After a bit of USB sniffing with Wireshark to see what I needed to send I was also able to make a little app using libusb/hidapi so I can just pass an arbitrary sensitivity as an argument in a bat file. I won't post it as it's a pretty bare-bones app for a specific purpose and I don't want people bricking their wheels with it. If anybody else is having the same issue and would like to use it send me a pm.
Hi, I had the same behavior on my CSR wheel. I also managed to create an app that send an inflated SEN value to the wheel but it didn’t solve my issue.
I managed to get it solved by temporary disable Driver Signature enforcement on Windows 10 and performing a reinstallation of the driver (In my case it was a firmware re-update to 796 version) but I supposed it push the driver again.