Some time ago, I purchased a Logitech F710 controller. It worked quite well for me, but it stopped working properly a few months after I bought it- it would effectively drop out after moving aroudn 5 feet away. I’ve chalked this up to a hardware problem or a poor antenna. Recently I decided to investigate further. As a standard trouble shooting step, I tried the controller on my other PCs. to my surprise, I could use the controller from across the room when I connected it to my laptop, even when I put the laptop right next ot my desktop system. This seemed to indicate that the problem was not with the controller itself at all; but perhaps something related to my system itself.

I repeated this process on my older Desktop, which is acting as a CI server and postgres server for the moment, and got similar results- I was able to use it much further than the 5 feet that I seem to need to hold the controller to the receiver on my desktop system. Originally I suspected it was merely wireless noise, as the area is filled with various other wireless systems, a Wii U, 3DS, etc. However placing the laptop right in the middle did not seem to shorten it’s range.

Thus we came to determining the actual problem. One suspect was USB3; my main system is my only system with USB3 ports, and furthermore, the only system with no USB2 ports. Of course, not having USB2 ports made it tricky to troubleshoot whether USB3 was somehow the problem. As a diagnostic test, I took a USB2 hub I had and connected it, then plugged in the controllers receiver. I compared the reliability between having it connected to the hub, and connecting it directly to my front panel.

Imagine my surprise, as the F710 functioned better and with a longer range if I used the USB2 hub. I could not explain this behaviour… but it still wasn’t as good as the laptop.

My next course of action was to comparethe behaviour I experienced on my system with the experience I got connecting the device within various VMs; if in fact it is software related, that would point to that or not.

In the process I swapped to the second port, disconnecting my 128GB PNY Flash Drive. To my surprise, it worked perfectly in the VM. So it was a software issue? Not so fast- for repeatability sake, I now tried again in the host system- and it worked fine. That is when I clued in- was it related to the Flash Drive?

I left the Controller plugged in. I then plugged the USB 3.0 Flash drive in. Suddenly, my problems returned- connectivity was low and I needed to be near the system for it to continue to function. I unplugged it- and, lo and behold- it worked again. I found the problem, it seems, though I’m not entirely sure of the cause, it seems that using a USB3 device may somehow interfere with the Nano receiver for the controller. My problems almost certainly started when I purchased the Flash drive, as it typically remained connected most of the time. the bouts of the device working fine were when I had disconnected it or was using it elsewhere.