Control surfaces flips back to center after 2-3 seconds of holding joystick still?

I deflect the joystick in X or Y direction. The cockpit stick and control surfaces follow as they should.

But holding joystick still 2-3 seconds, the cockpit stick and control surfaces flips back to center position again.

The moment I move the joystick again ever so slightly, it flips back to deflected position and then again if joystick held still cockpit stick and control surfaces flips back to center position yet again.

This is something stupid but I don't know what.

Joystick is HOTAS Warthog an it behaves fine in Thrustmasters "Device Analyzer" in Target Editor.

What is going on?

Plane is TF51 in DCS.

As long as I constantly moves the joystick it works as it should but if I hold it still the cockpit stick and control surfaces flips back to center by themselves.

Now it stopped doing this. Have no idea what happened or why.

Looked at it in "Device Analyzer" analyzer again before it stopped and again the joystick looked solid in Device Analyzer".

Some software was confused somewhere I guess.

Make sure you don't have multiple joysticks bound to the same axes (ie, two devices bound to pitch/roll/yaw axes on the same aircraft). This can lead to the behavior you describe.

Something like that occurred to me. I deleted the keys (left, right, up, down) in DCS "ADJUST CONTROLS" but nothing changed. I put the keys back again. For some reason it disappeared. No other joystick is connected except the Warthog throttle.

Interestingly the stick was also micro twitching (small movements) while centered. That is also not happening now.

I like to think, I do think this caused a bunch of my crashes. There this weird, I could start and land reasonably well, reprogrammed the Warthog (inside from DCS) and suddenly I could barely takeoff or land without crashing. I reset the "ADJUST CONTROLS" settings twice now, starting over thinking I screwed something up in programming the "ADJUST CONTROLS".

One specific time, this definitely must have been it. I had taken off but suddenly TF51 nosed down, I pulled the stick back, it rose again, then few seconds later it nosed down again, repeat a few times and I crashed. Seemed I didn't have rudder err elevator authority to keep the noose up. Now thinking about it, this flicking to center could have caused this if there wasn't enough up trim to keep the noose up with stick centered.

Only other thing I could think of is making sure the joystick is properly calibrated.

It's a Warthog, joystick + throttle. I searched for calibration before this problem occurred and found this:

" Can You Calibrate Warthog?" thread:

https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=65901

Summary: Thrustmaster doesn't have a calibration program on their web sites but sent a calibration programs to 'quinncidence' when he asked for it and it solved his problem.

Thread is 7 years old. Maybe those calibration program from TM are still fine, maybe they are not. I need to read that entire thread. Calibration programs (one for throttle + one for joystick) are included in thread courtesy 'quinncidence'.

In Microsoft Joystick test ("Set up USB game controllers" -> properties -> test) it's one pixel short of getting the same range up and left as down and right. No flickering. There's an calibration option with Microsoft that I hesitate to use for now until I understand it better. I've seen "don't use Microsoft calibration" for MFG Crosswind for example.

In TM TARGET script editor "Device Analyzer" I get the full 0-65535 in both axes. No flickering. I trust TMs test more. It seems to work now so I don't touch it for now.

Just noticed. The micro mouse on the throttle was connected to 'pitch' and 'roll'.