• FreeBSD 14.1 (Xfce)
• Microsoft Sidewinder Precision Pro (USB)

• Joysticks on FreeBSD need to be at /dev/uhid# ¹⁾
• uhidd by-default does /dev/uvhid#, that can be symlinked to /dev/uhid# or be done automatically with uhidd -H uhid
• uhidd has a lot of flags in examples for keyboard/mouse/consumer, but a joystick only needs the virtual generic interface with uhidd -h
• uhidd has to unbind whatever is on the joystick with uhidd -u
• Seemingly once uhidd takes control of the original /dev/input/event# device, if it had evdev or joystick forced through xorg.conf that driver gets unloaded according to Xorg.0.log
• USB devices are by-default put into /dev/uhid# paths with older uhid and usb drivers ²⁾

• 2024/09/09: uhidd is required to move game controllers to /dev/uhid# when using usbhid

• https://wiki.freebsd.org/uhidd
• https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=uhidd
• See devd.conf rule below to automate this

su -

pkg install uhidd

uhidd -h -H 'uhid' -u '/dev/ugen0.6'

• https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/usb-joystick-with-flightgear.94855/#post-671138
• TODO: Figure out if ugen match is required (works fine without it but might be safer on other USB stacks newer than usbhid)

su -

pkg install uhidd

ee '/usr/local/etc/devd/sidewinder-joystick-uhidd.conf'

notify 0 {
        match "type" "ATTACH";
        match "ugen" "ugen[0-9]+.[0-9]+";
        match "vendor" "0x045e";
        match "product" "0x0008";
        action "env LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libcuse.so /usr/local/sbin/uhidd -h -H uhid -u /dev/$ugen";
};