In 2014 I purchased a Fanatec Club Sport Pedals V2 (US) with the hope that I would never have issues with noise generated by old potentiometers because these pedals were supposed to use Hall Sensors.

After a few years of use, I noticed that my clutch pedal (the left pedal), started to generate random noise. In racing titles it doesn't matter because I don't use the clutch, but the paddles.

However, I used those pedals for flight sims rudders, with a merged setup using Gremlin Joystick, and it works great... except when the clutch starts generating noise and my fighter moves in unexpected ways.

This C program detects this noise and it generates a warning, in the style of bitchin betty, saying "rudder rudder". When I hear those words I know that the clutch is having issues, so I push it a few times and the problem goes away.

Fanatec does not sell replacement hall sensors for these pedals so this is how I solved this problem when using my pedals with DCS World, Falcon BMS, Prepare3D, Strike Fighters and all the Microsoft Flight Simulation titles. So I continue using those pedals today!

The program is extremely light and it barely consumes any CPU resources which is desirable to keep up the FPS. This is why I developed this in C.

If you run the program without parameters, the program will print help.

And in my case, this is how I run this program when my computer starts (I have a 12700K CPU, so I like it to run on the efficient cores only with the specific affinity mask but that is optional):

fanatecmonitor.exe --joystick 1 --flags 266 --iterations 90000 --margin 1 --idle --affinitymask 983040

The latest release of this program is built with NetBeans 18. I have been using this program for a year and it works just fine for me so I decided to share it in case it is useful to somebody else. The "rudder" warning is said by the sayrudder.ps1 powershell script. So my program simply calls powershell with that script to make your PC talk to you, I know it's lazy but it works ok. The script should be placed in the same directory as the .exe program.

If you decide to build this program from source, I added a few notes in main.c regarding some system libraries used and you might also want to delete a step in the makefiles where I copy the binary to my own C:\users[myusername]\downloads. The makefile produces an MinGW64 .exe file.

The program can be used with any type of control, any brand, you just need to run it in verbose mode to find out your control id and the information you want to read from the controller with the flags parameter. However, in my case it works because the pedals are not really used that much when flying, but if the axis you would like to “fix” is the one that controls your player movement for example, which is used all the time, then there is not too much this program can do unless you are able to fine tune parameters so much, so good luck with that.

Using this program makes sense for me because if one of my pedals is starting to generate noise, then my plane is going to go in the wrong direction and then I hear the warning, so I just push it a couple of times and the warning goes away and then I can continue flying and sporadically/actively use the rudder pedals if I am just cruising/fighting.

If I am actively pushing the pedals and I hear the warning I would ignore it because I know I am the one generating the input, however that barely happens because the program is designed to detect movement in a specific area where the noise is generated in my case. Some times that noise might be caused by my own movements but that rarely happens, most of the time that area where the noise is generated/detected is caused by the hardware problem in my pedals.