Gamepad recognized but not registering any input

[Smeuuh]

Hi,

I have a USB dancemat that used to work as a gamepad in 17.1 but doesn't seem to anymore. When I plug it in, dmesg says

[ 178.410455] usb 1-2.1: new full-speed USB device number 12 using xhci_hcd
[ 178.500079] usb 1-2.1: New USB device found, idVendor=054c, idProduct=0268
[ 178.500083] usb 1-2.1: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[ 178.500085] usb 1-2.1: Product: FutureMax Dance Mat
[ 178.502138] input: FutureMax Dance Mat as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-2/1-2.1/1-2.1:1.0/0003:054C:0268.0004/input/input23
[ 178.554770] sony 0003:054C:0268.0004: input,hiddev0,hidraw0: USB HID v1.11 Joystick [FutureMax Dance Mat] on usb-0000:00:14.0-2.1/input0

It appears in /dev/input/js0, and is recognized by evtest and jstest-gtk, reporting (as far as I can tell) correct capabilities and name. However, it doesn't recognize any input, in either evtest, jstest-gtk or cat /dev/input/js0.

It also appears to have been reported at https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=204861, with no answer.

This occured after upgrading from 17.1 to 17.3. It worked fine before. It's fully reproductible. It's not a problem of my dancemat (I have two, and both of them stopped working).

[Davidian1024 (david-brinovec)]

I believe I am also affected by this bug. I also think it may be related to or possibly even a duplicate of bug #1328065.

I have a RedOctane dance mat that has worked for years. It still works in fact. I have an older PC that I had been using it with to play stepmania. That PC is running Ubuntu 14.10. I stopped updating it years ago. The mat works as it always has with this PC.

I wanted to build a new stepmania machine with a somewhat newer machine I had laying around. I installed the current LTS release of Ubuntu 16.04 on that machine and everything works fine except the dance mat. The situation is nearly identical to what Smeuuh described above. I can see the mat being detected in the system log.

But no input is registered. stepmania recognizes that the device is connected but never detects my button presses. When I cat the corresponding device file there is no data written to my terminal when I press the buttons.

On the older machine running 14.10 I repeated all the and everything works normally. I see the dance mat show up in the system log just as I do on the machine running 16.04.

I have since tried on two other machines. I had another machine laying around, so I installed 16.10 on it. Same problem. An interesting twist. I also have a laptop that is running Ubuntu. 14.04 in this case. I see the same problem with the laptop as well.

So, the mat only works with the machine that is currently running 14.10.

The mat seems to be detected, but no input is registered on these Ubuntu variants: 14.04, 16.04, 16.10

[Smeuuh (smeuuh)]

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1584475, should fix it. I can't test it unfortunately, but if you do and it works can you close the bug?

[Davidian1024 (david-brinovec)]

I suspect that patch might work for you, but I don't think it's going to work for me. My device reports itself as a "RedOctane USB Pad". From the patch details I see the code specifically looks for the string "FutureMax Dance Mat".

Because of that doubt, I'm not terribly inclined to go through all the work of downloading the kernel, applying that patch to it, compiling it and booting my system with it.

That said, bug #1584475 does sounds related. They might just need to modify the patch so that it also looks for "RedOctane USB Pad" as well. I'm going to post in that thread.