Let me give you an invaluable pro-life tip.
Apple juice and electronics, not good bedfellows. Yes, I accidentally moved a pillow while lying on my bed that shifted in a way that knocked over about 2 oz of unfiltered apple juice onto my bedside table (because I need to wash down that oh-so-delicious Alvesco before going to sleep). A few droplets of juice managed to find their way to the Joy-Cons on my Switch messing with the joystick, the menu button, and the up button. I tried doing some rudimentary cleaning around the affected areas, hoping I would not need to take apart the Joy-Cons to clean them, but the joystick continued feeling a bit gummy.
On a completely separate note, but still related to the topic today, almost a year back, one of our Joy-Cons suffered a traumatic injury and the entire joystick broke off of the Joy-Con unit. This will come to play later in the article.
So I decided that if I was going to dig into the guts of the Joy-Con controller, I might as well just go ahead and buy a pair of Hall Effect joystick replacements so I would not run the risk of sending off the Tears of the Kingdom Joy-Cons to Nintendo when the joysticks inevitably fall prey to drift and getting back a mismatched pair of black and neon blue Joy-Cons in return. In short Hall Effect, joysticks use magnets rather than additional physical components to realign the joystick. Or I could be wrong, but there's the Wikipedia article about it, which is better at words than I am.
I bought the
pair of joysticks from GuliKit on Amazon, which seems to be the Internet's go-to for Hall Effet joystick replacements for anything that comes with analog joysticks. I was also happy that the kit came packaged with the necessary tools to make the replacement like the tri-head screwdriver, plastic tweezers, and a guitar pick-like tool to wedge apart pieces. In the end, I did not need the additional screws that were packaged and the joystick caps I am not sure if I will do anything with those, at least not on the
TotK controllers as they do not visually mesh well together.
Before digging into the Joy-Cons, I did watch a tutorial from
Hand Held Legend's YouTube page which did a decent job of explaining and showing the steps to take out the old joysticks and installing the new ones. I was a little annoyed that there was not an extended zoom-in when each of the ribbon cables was pulled out of their respective slots. Additionally, when he was reassembling the Joy-Cons, the video was sped up to the point of not being useful. Sure, he said, "Do the process in reverse to put it back together," which is all well and good except for trying to slide in a .25mm thick ribbon cable into a .30mm* wide opening with a pair of plastic tweezers while praying to Iwata that you do not damage the money end of the cable caused a bit of anxiety on my part. And I started with the right Joy-Con which has an additional ribbon cable delicately placed over one of the screws to take out the joystick which inevitably got in the way of trying to insert the ribbon cable for the joystick itself. I did step away from trying to insert the ribbon cables at one point because my hands started shaking and I sank into frustration. I obviously did get the cable to reconnect, although I will be honest in that I was not 100% satisfied with how it looked, but it appears to have at least been enough.
I should also add that while I was up in there, I did do some isopropyl alcohol swabbing and drying to clean out as much of the apple juice residue as I could get. Although later that night, I did realize that I had forgotten to clean more around the menu button, but more on that later.
The second Joy-Con replacement went considerably faster, partly because I had already one successful joystick replacement under my belt, but also because there was one fewer ribbon cable to deal with. I do want to add/confess, that I know that I should have disconnected the battery while working on the Joy-Cons, but I did not like the way Hand Held Legend pulled on the wires in his video and I could not tell if I should pull up or pull out. I was fearful that I would end up pulling in the wrong direction and somehow permanently damage the wires to the battery so I left the battery connected. When I have done work on my various laptops to replace screens and upgrade RAM, I have disconnected the battery, so I know the importance of disconnecting a power source from an electronic device while you are working on it, I was just afraid of potentially doing more harm by tugging on those oh-so-delicate wires.
I know that is probably not advised, but I do own up to it.
There was also something that I did not disconnect because the video glossed over the "disconnect the connecter at the bottom." Like the battery, I could not tell how I was supposed to disconnect whatever that little connector thing was and how I might reconnect in the "just put everything back the way it was" phase. And because I could just move it out of the way, I just left it connected.
Then I reconnected the reassembled Joy-Cons to the Switch, and in the main menu screen, was able to move the cursor around with both joysticks, pressed several buttons to make sure that they all functioned and it seemed like everything was kosher. So I jumped back into
Tears of the Kingdom and Link proceeded to run off a cliff of his own volition. I let go of both Joy-Cons, and Link was running. On his own. Without me touching the controllers. This is the definition of Joy-Con drift, and the Hall Effect joysticks I had just installed were supposed to be the end-all to this problem. I did have a momentary moment of panic and I thought that I had somehow screwed up the ribbon cables or maybe had dropped a
Junior Mint in the works while closing it up; that's a Seinfeld reference for all you Gen Zers. Then I realized that I had not calibrated the Joy-Cons, which is something not mentioned in the tutorial but seemed like something I should do. Sure enough, the joystick was drifting like a drunken circus monkey. So I went through the process of calibrating both joysticks and thankfully, that seems to have worked.
One concern that I have not touched on was something that I had read about Hall Effect joysticks, being that they require more power to operate, because of the magnets apparently, and may incur more significant battery drain than analog joysticks. Having now used the Switch for a full week with the new Hall Effect joysticks, I will say that I have not noticed any significant battery drain issues. This is a purely unscientific opinion as I have no data to back my opinion up, but someone out there might have information to add to this, one way or the other.
The other concern that I have is that by replacing the joysticks, I have effectively voided the warranty on the Joy-Cons. So in the future, if I have legitimate concerns with the Joy-Cons, they will not fix the Joy-Cons. I did feel a little anxious about this, but since the only reason I have sent Joy-Cons back to Nintendo to be fixed in the past has been for Joy-Con drift, I felt a little better having (successfully) repaired the issue myself.
I might still be able to have my second pair of Joy-Cons replaced, one of which is the one I mentioned at the beginning of this article. I used one of the joysticks from the OLED TotK Switch to replace the broken joystick. It is an original part from Nintendo, although not specifically from that generation of Joy-Con, so I guess we will have to wait and see if that breaks the warranty when Joy-Con drift inevitably happens on those.
So for the time being I am very happy with how the replacement process ended up. I have noticed a little stickiness on the up button on the left Joy-Con and I did have some connectivity issues with the Menu button on the same left Joy-Con, but I cannot be sure if that was from the apple juice or my own tinkering; the issue is that the Joy-Con disconnected a few seconds after pressing the Menu button, which happened three separate times the first night, but has not happened since.
Still, I count this as a success.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
*P.S. I do not actually know how thick the ribbon cables are.
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