- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
One of the biggest issues that’s plagued the Nintendo Switch since its launch in 2017 is stick drift. In fact, Nintendo faced several lawsuits as a result of the issue, with an ex-repair supervisor previously stating that the workload to fix drifting Joy-Con was “very stressful”.
Now, while we can acknowledge that Nintendo has undoubtedly been working hard behind the scenes to mitigate the issue for the upcoming Switch 2, we’re nevertheless disheartened to confirm that the Joy-Con 2’s joysticks will not be Hall Effect.
Joycon doesn’t have magnets the switch itself does. Although when docked with the switch it probably would interfere. I have to imagine there’s a way to program against that if there’s a consistent magnetic source.
I worked at a company that relied on magnetometers (digital compass) and used strong magnets as well to attach the product to existing infrastructure. All we needed to do was calibrate the sensors with that magnetic field and we got very accurate results. We even had a method for users to do this in the field if something in their environment changed, our method was a lot more precise (we had a motorized, standard rig to do the rotations), but you can get really good results just by following some simple directions.
I highly doubt it would be an issue here. Worst case scenario, fall back to a relatively user-friendly calibration process. The main goal is to get the device to rotate in all axes, and slowly enough to get a reading for a range of angles. The process wouldn’t be that different than those fingerprint sensor things, but with rotation instead of touching a sensor. They do something similar already with the Ring Fit calibration, so I don’t think it would be a deal-breaker.
If the magents are in the handheld it would mean that they would need to be recalibrated every time the joycons are taken off right? Thatcwould be terrible in a consumer product if I’m understanding correctly.
No, it can detect when it’s connected, so it would just switch to the other calibration factors.
I don’t know why i didn’t think of that. Was kinda trying to figure out why not use them when they aren’t that much more expensive considering how expensive the new joycons will probably be.
The cynic in me says, “so they can sell more replacements,” but there could be a technical reason that I’m not aware of. I’m not familiar with the technical details of hall effect sticks, so I could very well be missing some downsides.
Ah, so that’s why joycons attach magnetically this time! /s