Thrustmaster T150 Force Feedback Wheel Linux drivers

DISCLAMER This is not an official driver from Thrustmaster and is provided without any kind of warranty. Loading and using this driver is at your own risk; I don't take responsibility for kernel panics, devices bricked or any other kind of inconvenience

Project status

What's working 👌

• All axis and buttons of the wheel are reported¹
• You can set the range of the wheel from 270° to 1080°
• You can set the return force of the wheel from 0% to 100%
• Force feedback (partially)
  • You can set the global force feedback scale from 0% to 100%
  • Settable gain FF_GAIN
  • Periodic effects: FF_SINE, FF_SAW_UP and FF_SAW_DOWN
  • Constant effects: FF_CONSTANT
  • Condition effects: FF_SPRING
  • Damper effects: FF_DAMPER
• Firmware version is reported

¹: Except for the shifter buttons, because I don't have the PRO version. However if the hid report is correct they should work just fine

What is missing 🚧

• Reading the settings from the wheel
• Force feedback (partially)
• Force feedback settings
• Firmware upgrades
• Handling of range changes from the wheel

How to use the driver

Always put the switch of your wheel to the PS3 position before plug it into your machine!

Switch the wheel from FFB to full T150

When attached to your machine the wheel reports itself as Thrustmaster FFB Wheel, in this mode not all functionalities are available. In order to switch to the Thrustmaster T150RS we have to send the following USB control packet to the wheel:

To do so we can use the hid-tminit driver (See the install section, if you use the install script it should do it automatically) xor you can write a simple userspace applications like this one thanks to libusb.

When the wheel receives the control packet it will reset and re-appear in the system as a T150.

Setting up the wheel parameters

You can edit the settings of each wheel attached to the machine by writing the sysfs attributes usually found in the subdirectories at /sys/devices. You can see in dmesg what path in /sys the input subsystem assigned to the wheel: for example if you see input: Thrustmaster T150 steering wheel as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-1/input/input27 then the attributes will be located at sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-1/input/input27/device/.

This table contains a summary of each attribute

Custom defaults

To automatically set the wheel to some custom default settings when plugged you'll have to write a simple udev rule. In /etc/udev/rules.d create a text file called something like 99-t150-defaults.rules and write a rule like this below

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="044f", ATTRS{idProduct}=="b677", ATTR{range}="270"

Then run udevadm control --reload and udevadm trigger to re-load the rules. The rule in the example should set the turning range to 270°.

How to install and load the driver

You can try to run install.sh as root, the script should: copy the udev rules and other files in their appropriate positions, build and install the DKMS modules and add them to the list of modules to be loaded at boot.

To check if the modules are loaded check the output of lsmod | grep hid-t150 and lsmod | grep hid-tminit.

Manually

Copy the udev rules into /etc/udev/rules.d/ and reload the udev rules (or reboot)...

Build the drivers

For a simple build: install all the required tools to compile (like build-essential, linux-headers etc...) and run

make

into the t150 and hid-tminit folders. Now you can load the .ko files with insmod and unload them with rmmod