Bricked WartHog FSS
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Recently acquired a “slightly used” WartHog FSS stick that still had the yellow arrow stickers on it and didn’t have a scratch on it. It was dirt cheap and said “take as is, for parts”; which indicated to me that the seller either didn’t know how to use it OR that it was bricked/busted. So what the hey, it was dirt cheap and was worth the gamble and at least would be a cache of spare parts.
Sure enough, it arrived in perfect cosmetic condition (rare because people don’t pack things well enough for the mail gorillas these days). And as I suspected, it didn’t work on my PC that is already set up for both Cougar and WartHog. Oddly enough, the Device Manager picked it up right away; but the Windows control panel Game Controller list did not. Further inspection, the Device manager shows the Bulk Loader for the WartHog in its list. When I plug in my working WartHog, the Bulkloader does not show, but rather two HID Usb devices instead.
This reminds me of how a WartHog behaves that has been bricked or needs to be reflashed with firmware. After figuring out again (its been years) where the firmware flasher utility is, I run it and it will not complete successfully. Uh oh, this is looking like a bricked device.
THen comes to mind, a couple of times some of my Wing mates have bricked or busted their WartHog sticks because either they plugged the grip in backwards w/r/t the base, or TMs assemblers (in China where its made) may have put in the connectors backwards or busted some of the wire connections. So I take a closer look at the 5 pin connector and it looks like someone clamped down really hard on the connector mounting. This is beginning to look like a plugged in backwards bricked or broken connector mishandled situation.
I plug the WH FSS into another working set, and fortunately the stick grip itself works fine. The problem must be in the base then. After taking apart the base to get at the female end of the 5 pin connector, I can see that the black plastic connector is loose from its metal mounting and that the wires and connector sockets look OK. Plugging the base female connector directly into the FSS side male connector, seems to do the trick. The WH now updates properly and shows up in the game controller list.
Mystery solved, someone must have force the connector down such that it pushed the lower female connector out of reach. Most likely due to plugging them together backwards and fortunately without electrical or mechanical damage beyond pushing them apart so they wouldn’t connect. The good thing is now I have captured what this kind of problem looks like on the PC end that points to the hardware fault.
WartHog base opened up to gain access to the 5 Pin female connector
WartHog not updating firmware and its error code, note that it does show up in the device manager
Device Manager list of HID when WH wont update (Bulk Loader in the list is an indication to update the firmware)
What it looks like when the connector mating is correct and the firmware updates successfully
The patient survived the operation and is good to go
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nie find , good treasure hunted