Cougar calibration woes and fix!

After I recently built a new rig with a clean install of Win 10, I had all sorts of problems with my Cougar. The throttle was only registering 40% to 100% through the full range of travel, the centre points for the ant range and elevation dials were way off (about 30%) and then the stick started to drift off centre even with my U2 NXT gimbals and sensors. Tried all sorts of things to sort it out (new pots, reinstall drivers multiple times, clearing Windows registry values, manual calibration etc). However, re-reading the various manuals (and there are a lot!), I came across the sentence that jogged my memory of a similar problem way back in the distant past:

"Flashing the firmware is such a fundamental task that you must get comfortable with, as it will get you out of trouble should you run into problems with your Cougar 99 times out of 100!"

I hadn't flashed the firmware for ages (probably 10 years). Anyway followed the instructions and hey presto, Cougar back to fully functionality. :doh:

So a heads up to anyone having similar weird calibration problems with this Hotas, try flashing the firmware as it may be the problem and not hardware related. :thumbup:

Thanks for the tip :)

Do you think the firmware flash only affects the stick, or the throttle as well?

I've put $$ into upgrading the throttle only, but the microstick is a fail.

The firmware resides in the controller board in the stick base, so you are flashing that. However, this will also reset the calibration of the three throttle axes if you have he throttle connected to the stick. Obviously if the microstick is worn / dead a firmware flash won't help but it will sort out a lot of potential calibration issues.

Where’s the micro stick on the cougar hotas

Where’s the micro stick on the cougar hotas

Here: