A friend bought a CSW this week and I cant seem to figure out how to get FFB working in LFS.
The FFB works fine in the driver and AC so it appears to be a LFS issue.

I've already tried disconnecting the pedals to make sure the wheels is the only controller that windows sees and I've also made sure that the wheels is the primary game controller in windows neither of which helped.

Any ideas?

I assume you can use wheels+pedals, just there is no FFB?
Did you enable FFB in Options - Controlls - Axes / FF?
Set FFB strength to non-zero? (slider at top)
Press shift+C while driving = "restore controllers"?

yeah except for the ffb the wheel and pedals work perfectly fine
and yes ffb is enabled in the options and turned up way too high for it not to be noticeable
i havent tried resetting the controllers in game although im not sure how that would help when restarting lfs doesnt

Maybe a weird question, but are the Fanatec drivers installed, and up-to-date? Also, what firmware is on the wheel? Might want to look into that. Maybe LFS uses a different method to send FFB to wheels.

There is no other way than the DirectInput way. If you are really out of options, you can try to grab a proxy dinput8.dll and pipe the appropriate DInput calls parameters and results to some debugging output. This might give you some idea what's going on.

Quote from Bose321 :

Maybe a weird question, but are the Fanatec drivers installed, and up-to-date? Also, what firmware is on the wheel? Might want to look into that. Maybe LFS uses a different method to send FFB to wheels.

yes of course the 177 driver are installed (at least i think that was the latest version when we installed it about a week ago
and i have no idea which firmware is on the wheel since the driver doesnt tell you

I contacted LFSTech today and got an answer with no solution, suggesting to open a topic but I found this and thought mine would be related. I actually have FFB on my wheel playing LFS, but the game just kills the motors. The fans are blowing hot air and smoky smell after 5 minutes of gameplay, whereas in other sims I can easily go for a 5 hour session without trouble, and even then the airflow feels cool. Note that even at 25% force, which is relatively low it still has a problem. Somebody met a similar problem? Any solutions?

Works fine on my CSW's here. Sounds like something you might want to discuss with Fanatec? I can't imagine that LFS causes damage to a wheel, although it's weird that you only experience in there.

Quote from Kristi :

I contacted LFSTech today and got an answer with no solution, suggesting to open a topic but I found this and thought mine would be related. I actually have FFB on my wheel playing LFS, but the game just kills the motors. The fans are blowing hot air and smoky smell after 5 minutes of gameplay, whereas in other sims I can easily go for a 5 hour session without trouble, and even then the airflow feels cool. Note that even at 25% force, which is relatively low it still has a problem. Somebody met a similar problem? Any solutions?

I've noticed on my GT3rs that LFS' force feedback is almost always applying pressure while iRacing's is very soft until you hit a bump or a curb.. you can really feel it. Meanwhile in LFS I've become accustomed to only slight changes. Maybe just try turning the Force Feedback strength down? Turn centering spring/belt off?

I've fiddled around with every setting and the result is the same. LFS gives the same feeling to the wheel while turning (oscillation) as iRacing in a standing car. The FFB has a kind of clicking noise when turning the wheel, not in the other simulators though. ETS2 also had a similar effect on the wheel, without the burning smell though.

so today we updated the drivers to v2.00 and the firmware to v53 and... still nothing