factual opinions

Joysticks are great, right? Driving cars, flying planes, shooting generic aliens in space, everything is more fun with joysticks. Except, mine had a problem. Has a problem. Logitech claims their products have auto-calibration, but what a load of useless crap. My Freedom 2.4Ghz stick has gotten horribly unusable over the years, flying in Battlefield 1942 was an exercise in chaos theory as the plane rolled and jerked spastically from side to side, the rudder flapping like a loose vagina. There was random annoying drift on all axes because the auto-center mechanism is susceptible to aging. I blame sloppy Logitech engineering.

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So I’d given up on it. It was collecting dust. Until I stumbled across a utility from Logitech called DXTweak2. If you’re following this to recalibrate your own joystick go download it now and come back when you’ve got it running. It not a perfect program, you have to have this utility running whenever you want the joystick to be correctly calibrated because the stuff it does isn’t saved permanently. It has to be open to wedge itself between the game and Windows, to continuously correct the raw data from the joystick.. and unfortunately that takes a bit of processing power.

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Anyway, warnings aside you’ll need two things to get your joystick back in working condition: a new axis center and a proper deadzone. How to do that? Well, I’m incredibly lazy and didn’t want to manually calculate the numbers every time, so I created this handy form where you just input some relevant numbers and it tells you the new numbers.

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I’ll guide you through calibrating the Y axis in three (four) easy steps, you’ll only need to interact with the three boxes I’ve circled in red:

1. Grab your joystick and wiggle it up and down a bit (no that’s not a euphemism), see how the Raw number change? Without using too much force push the stick up until you feel resistance building (still not euphemizing!). Write the Raw number into the Raw Minimum field below.
2. Do the same pushing downwards, entering the number into Raw Maximum.
3. Hit Calculate and input the number from New Deadzone and New Center into DXTweak2.
4. Pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

That’s all there is to it, your Y axis should now be perfectly centered. If you wiggle it again you can see the red Y Axis arrow moves as it did before, but the black arrow just underneath stays still, indicating Windows doesn’t see it moving.

Rinse repeat for the remaining axes.

Pretty simple huh? Enjoy your new re-calibrated joystick. Leave a comment or mail me if something's wrong or missing.