Nintendo

This was fun when I did it too. Good job!

Good stuff.

I have a Switch Pro controller. They're decent hardware aside from one design flaw. The d-pad. The "stem" about which the whole plastic d-pad piece swivels (in order to be rotated and pressed into the pressure pads) is too short, so it's wonky. The main symptom is that pressing one direction on the d-pad is very likely to give you a different-direction input than the one you pressed. (Press d-pad right and the game responds as if you pressed d-pad up, for instance.)

And that's very unlikely to be a problem if you're playing casually. But I got into speedrunning a bit. (Breath of the Wild, specifically.) And it was a deal breaker. So I disassembled it and added a tiny bit of scotch tape to make up for it. That was pretty fiddly but worked well once I was done and had reassembled it. But later I got a 3d printer and printed myself a replacement d-pad pastic piece to replace the stock one and it works better still and was not fiddly at all.

I didn't take any photos of the process. But now my all-black Switch Pro controller has a cool bright-red D-pad.

@[email protected] The first time I tried to swap it, I destroyed the ribbon cable of the replacement. 🤭

Nice job

Is there a reason you did this instead of sending them in for service?

Are the replacement parts official? Are they better? Is there a brand you prefer?

Asking because I have the correct driver and work on other electronics, but don’t know anything about replacement parts for Nintendo.


edit: Just realized I should check ifixit, and found these:

https://www.ifixit.com/products/nintendo-switch-joy-con-switch-lite-gulikit-hall-effect-joystick?variant=40272867655783

https://www.ifixit.com/products/nintendo-switch-joy-con-joystick?variant=39372012421223