Joysticks: Probably Still Drifty
Joy-Con joysticks use a potentiometer to read the voltage at a wiper that slides across a strip of resistive material. That material wears down over time, or plastic and dust can dirty the sensors.
Stick drift is a huge problem with other Switch models. One survey found that 40% of Switch owners had problems with their Joy-Cons drifting, and things didn’t get any better with the Lite or OLED editions. After a bunch of lawsuits, Nintendo’s president even admitted it and apologized, setting up a free repair program for customers in some parts of the world.
Nintendo doesn’t want to use Hall for the same reason neither of the Steam Decks have, the increased power consumption. From there it was easy for them to justify a magnetic locking mechanism for the new joycons.
But also fuck Nintendo
Hi, are you able to share more about the power efficiencies of each type of sensor? Some cursory browsing of TI datasheets gives me the impression that both types use a similar amount of power. I may be missing some context, though.
I did also find this cool report there. Could be pertinent, although from what I understand of the technology I don’t see why you couldn’t use the same techniques to save power with a digipot.
HE uses like 25% more power compared to the usual sensor. Meaning a huge decrease of about 2% in joycons battery life.
Not sure if that’s supposed to be sarcasm