I've just picked up ED so I'm starting with Beta 3. When I open ED controller config I can see my TM there. What does your config do that's not implemented in the default config? And sorry but how do I use the two files you provided?
This was my initial thought when I got mine, actually. The issue starts with something really simple. You have a toggle switch, it has an On state and and Off state. My initial thought was great, I can assign landing gear to the EAC toggle switch, and away I go. The issue is that the toggle switch, when flipped to an ARM (on) state presses a DirectX button (I've had too much wine tonight to go look up which one) and keeps it in an On state, until you turn it off, at which point it stops pressing that DirectX button. The issue here is that most games have a keypress/joystick button press that toggles the state of the aforementioned landing gear. You press the G key to raise AND to lower the gear. This doesn't work very well if you have a switch that sends a DirectX(button1) signal when it is flipped on, and nothing at all when it is flipped off. So, to fix this the manufacturerers (maybe too many erers, but again, wine) wrote an extremely powerful, but, at the same time extremely obtuse(at times) piece of software (that would be the T.A.R.G.E.T. software that you can download from their website) that lets you program the On state of a switch to send a pulse of that G keypress, and then when you switch it off, send that same command again. That sounds fairly ridiculous, but the alternative would be for the game developers to allow you to configure a keypress to lower the gear, and a different one to raise the gear, but only keep your landing gear lowered as long as a key was being held down. In the case of some flight simulators (DCS A-10 comes to mind) this is reasonable. In the case of a space combat/trading/mining/bounty-hunting/etc game, it's not very reasonable, so the advantage of being able to control what a switch does in both it's on-state and off-state becomes more important.
To address your second query:
The fcf file (it's just a plain text file, save it, and you can read it in notepad) save it as elite.fcf (the name, other than the extension doesn't really matter), and then open it in the TARGET GUI software available from Thrustmaster's website (ts.thrustmaster.com)
The custom.binds file is specific to elite, it's basically the configurate of your keybinds in E: D, and, for reasons best known to Frontier, is stored in a hidden directory in your user directory, for instance, mine is in: C:\Users\waterhouse\AppData\Local\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\Options\Bindings
and basically the custom.binds file maps your keypress/joystick-button/axis/etc to a command in the game. The .fcf profile maps your physical toggle-switch/button-press/triggerpull to a DirectX control(ie; DX1), and the binds file translates that into to doing something in the game. Honestly, it's kind of a pain in the ass(assin), however, if you want a toggle switch on your shiny new Warthog HOTAS to raise your landing gear when it's "on" and lower it when it's "off" you either have to figure it all out yourself, or trust someone else's purely code config. The FCF file is a happy medium, in that you can load it into the GUI software and you can see everything it's doing/configured to do.
Hope some of that made sense to someone... I'm honestly ready for bed. Let me know if it didn't make any sense and I'll try to clarify.
