Certainly, there’s a shared sense of boredom for much of the world right now. Many of us simply fill that time binge-watching shows we do not really care about or watching re-runs of series we have already watched a dozen times before. There are some, however, who are channeling that boredom into something productive. There are others who channeling that boredom into things that would make MacGyver proud.
Enter Matteo Pisani, a 28-year-old programmer and hacker. His hacking career started on some level at the age of three when he was already taking apart his toys, though presumably it took him a couple more years to start putting them back together. With over 10 years of experience in coding, multiple CTO positions, and even a pending patent, Matteo has done a lot in those 28 years.
It seems kind of odd, then, to see his latest project be something personal rather than commercial, though the lengths to which he goes during the process certainly shows his work ethic even for a personal project born out of boredom. One day the idea struck him that he could replace the analog stick on a Joy-Con with a capacitive trackpad. One of the main “pros” of his initial assessment of the idea was, of course, the removal of “Joy-Con drift.” In his words, “no Joystick = no drift.”
At that point, he went all in and started the process of prototyping, testing, and fabricating and ordering the necessary components for the mod. It’s an elaborate but thoughtful process that gets far too technical to go into detail here, but suffice it to say that after multiple phases of work, the Joy-Con was fitted with the capacitive trackpad.
The current state of the project means that the PCB used to control the trackpad is too large to fit within the Joy-Con shell itself and must be strapped to the back instead. His next phase is to rework the circuitry to fit on a smaller PCB that he could insert directly into the Joy-Con shell in the space where the analog stick box used to be, a mere 19 x 16 x4 mm space.
I personally prefer the feel of an analog stick compared to something like a trackpad or even the 3DS Circle Pad, but even I have to admit that the design is pretty slick. The pad itself could use some work for a final product but is really nice for a 3D-printed prototype. It would seem to alleviate the problem of Joy-Con drift, however, as this is a solid-state device and as such would be less susceptible to usage-based wear-and-tear. Additionally, since it is controlled via an Arduino, should things ever become miscalibrated, it could be adjusted there much more precisely than the native Switch calibration tool.
This is a prototype at best and may never see any sort of widespread distribution by Matteo, but there is currently some demand. A number of comments on the YouTube video have requested that the mod be made available, not just for Joy-Cons, but for a number of different controllers as well. This may mark the beginning of Matteo’s next big product in the coming years if demand is strong enough. Even still, it’s a niche product that would require some level of electronics experience to even install, so it may never be worth the time and effort to take something like this to production.
