u/Simbertold

After 1.5 years of light casual usage (including about a year of just standing on a shelf), a tiny spring in the base of my Ursa Minor Flightstick broke. Sounds pretty trivial, I contacted customer support and after some pointless back and forth they tell me that they are willing to send me that tiny spring for a total of $30 (including $25 in shipping). I honestly expected them to just send me the part as a courtesy, since the stick isn't that far out of warranty yet. But i'd also be totally fine to pay maybe 5-10€ for it.

But not $30. They could send me a whole flightstick for about 100€, and now they want a third of that for the tiniest of springs (of which there were 2 in the original stick).

At the point where they told me this price number, the chat just stopped working, too.

I guess i will order some random springs of roughly the same size from Ali Express, and if that doesn't work, i will buy a flight stick from some other company. I surely won't be buying anything from them again. And i'd advice against it in general.

Hi everyone,

sadly in my Ursa Minor one of the springs recentering the flightstick broke today. I am currently trying to get into contact with customer support for a replacement, but i guess it wouldn't hurt to look into how to fix this problem myself.

Does anyone know which data i would require to get a fitting replacement spring, and where i could get this information?

The Force Feedback function of my Winwing Ursa Minor Joystick does not seem to work in Archlinux. I do not know if this is a fundamental problem, or if there is some solution i can not find. Any advice would be appreciated.

Further description:

A few years back, when i was still running Windows, i got myself a Winwing Ursa Minor Joystick, mostly for flying some older space sims. Besides the general functionality, it also has some force feedback. In Windows, this force feedback works. Sadly, Winwing seems to be very windows focused, so there is absolutely no official support for this device in Linux.

The device itself runs very well immediately without me having to actually do anything. All buttons and axis work. I can use it in games, and everything is fine. Yet the force feedback does not seem to work at all. I used fftest to try to figure out what the problem is, and got the following result:

fftest /dev/input/event20
Force feedback test program.
HOLD FIRMLY YOUR WHEEL OR JOYSTICK TO PREVENT DAMAGES

Device /dev/input/event20 opened
Features:
 * Absolute axes: X, Y, Z, RX, RY, Throttle, Hat 0 X, Hat 0 Y,  
   [5F 00 03 00 00 00 00 00 ]
 * Relative axes:  
   [00 00 ]
 * Force feedback effects types:  
   Force feedback periodic effects:  
   [00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ]
 * Number of simultaneous effects: 0

Uploading effect #0 (Periodic sinusoidal) ... Error:: Function not implemented
Uploading effect #1 (Constant) ... Error: Function not implemented
Uploading effect #2 (Spring) ... Error: Function not implemented
Uploading effect #3 (Damper) ... Error: Function not implemented
Uploading effect #4 (Strong rumble, with heavy motor) ... Error: Function not implemented
Uploading effect #5 (Weak rumble, with light motor) ... Error: Function not implemented
Enter effect number, -1 to exit

Obviously, none of the numbers do anything. event20 is the correct device, which evtest shows. Does anyone have smart ideas in what direction to look to get this working, or if this is even possible? Online searches have only lead me to similar fftest results for some logitech driving wheels, and these threads do not seem to lead to solutions which fit my problem.