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Got drift? New tool allows you to re-calibrate your DualSense (PC required, works on PS5 after)
- Thread starter stopmrdomino
- Start date
It's so awful that all modern consoles don't support this at an OS level. Keen to try it on my controllers today.
EDIT: Sad to say that there was no meaningful improvement on my controllers. :(
EDIT: Sad to say that there was no meaningful improvement on my controllers. :(
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+1. Between 6 of us, varying levels of use, most of us keep them in their pouches, don't travel, drop, spill, or mistreat them- we've easily gone through 10 Series 1/2 for various issues. Grips, failing shoulder buttons, drift, double tapping buttons, etc. Terrible quality for the price- but the back buttons are game changers on competitive games. Such dook.
OP
OP
I bought a Series 1 Elite controller at launch and within two months had a grinding in the left stick. Swore off the Elite line for good after that.
It's a feature of the DualSense Edge, along with customizable button profiles. There's absolutely no good reason that both are not default system features.
Wow, tested quickly on FFXVI where I would always see the results of drifting using the curser on the map and sometimes when moving Clive around and while it's not fixed 100% (now actually shows occasional drift in the opposite direction :p) it's a massive step up from where it was and is often totally still..
Thanks!
Thanks!
Ok, so important reading for folks in this thread:
Source: Me. I've fixed about 100 controllers over the past year.
Stick drift is caused by wear and tear on the potentiometers that make up an analogue stick. On the inside of a potentiometer there is a section of almost "hoop" like resistive material, which when bridged can give a reading. The strength of the resistence differs at different parts of the "hoop". When you move the analogue stick, it rotates a little reader back and forth. Different positions give different readings - this is how the controller determines the "position" of the stick.
Now, what happens is that over time, as you rotate the reader back and forth, you scrape away at that resistive material. As you scrape away at it, the readings become less and less accurate and eventually you end up with drift. In some instances, this just means that your stick will appear to be "offset" by some value, and in other cases it means that you'll end up getting "jitter" on the stick.
Once the above has occurred, you will never be able to get a perfect reading again without replacing the potentiometers.
Whilst you certainly could use the calibration tool to "re-centre" and this may well "solve" or lessen the issue to some extent, it will not be a "like-new" solution. You've basically just calibrated it for faulty components which will deteriorate again, potentially faster than originally.
So is there any point to this tool?
Yes, absolutely and it's actually a god-send for people doing physical repairs
When we do a repair we typically replace the potentiometers with a fresh set. The problem is, the potentiometers are not made with uniform resistances. They tend to be similar, but not identical. Just for example, say a normal pot should give a reading of between -1.0 and +1.0, well your replacement pot might be slightly more or less resistive than the old one that the controller was calibrated for, and so just doing a simple swap now means that the reading is between -1.2 and + 0.8.
(AFAIK) this is true of all the pots, even the ones used in the original manufacturing process of the controller. The difference is, Sony and Microsoft calibrate them at the point of manufacturing so that regardless of the actual resistance of the pot, one extreme will always give -1.0 and the other will always give +1.0
Up until this point, we had no way of recalibrating the controllers - so doing a repair generally involved sticking in a random pot and hoping that it was similar enough to the original one that the calibration wasn't too off.
(Side note: there are additional mods you can install that let you "manually" calibrate the controllers to centre the readings, but these will often cause distortion in the overall range that the pot puts out. Either hitting the "limit" before full stick saturation, or meaning that you didn't reach the max value when the stick was fully saturated)
Basically, the repairs were a balancing act of getting it "close enough" that you wouldn't notice during gameplay, but a true "as new" repair was down to luck more than anything else.
Hopefully, with this tool it will mean that we can recalibrate the controllers to use any pots and don't have to worry getting lucky with the resistances!
I can't wait to try it out!
If you dont mind me asking, have you ever used those Aliexpress hall effect stick replacements?Ok, so important reading for folks in this thread:
Source: Me. I've fixed about 100 controllers over the past year.
Stick drift is caused by wear and tear on the potentiometers that make up an analogue stick. On the inside of a potentiometer there is a section of almost "hoop" like resistive material, which when bridged can give a reading. The strength of the resistence differs at different parts of the "hoop". When you move the analogue stick, it rotates a little reader back and forth. Different positions give different readings - this is how the controller determines the "position" of the stick.
Now, what happens is that over time, as you rotate the reader back and forth, you scrape away at that resistive material. As you scrape away at it, the readings become less and less accurate and eventually you end up with drift. In some instances, this just means that your stick will appear to be "offset" by some value, and in other cases it means that you'll end up getting "jitter" on the stick.
Once the above has occurred, you will never be able to get a perfect reading again without replacing the potentiometers.
Whilst you certainly could use the calibration tool to "re-centre" and this may well "solve" or lessen the issue to some extent, it will not be a "like-new" solution. You've basically just calibrated it for faulty components which will deteriorate again, potentially faster than originally.
So is there any point to this tool?
Yes, absolutely and it's actually a god-send for people doing physical repairs
When we do a repair we typically replace the potentiometers with a fresh set. The problem is, the potentiometers are not made with uniform resistances. They tend to be similar, but not identical. Just for example, say a normal pot should give a reading of between -1.0 and +1.0, well your replacement pot might be slightly more or less resistive than the old one that the controller was calibrated for, and so just doing a simple swap now means that the reading is between -1.2 and + 0.8.
(AFAIK) this is true of all the pots, even the ones used in the original manufacturing process of the controller. The difference is, Sony and Microsoft calibrate them at the point of manufacturing so that regardless of the actual resistance of the pot, one extreme will always give -1.0 and the other will always give +1.0
Up until this point, we had no way of recalibrating the controllers - so doing a repair generally involved sticking in a random pot and hoping that it was similar enough to the original one that the calibration wasn't too off.
(Side note: there are additional mods you can install that let you "manually" calibrate the controllers to centre the readings, but these will often cause distortion in the overall range that the pot puts out. Either hitting the "limit" before full stick saturation, or meaning that you didn't reach the max value when the stick was fully saturated)
Basically, the repairs were a balancing act of getting it "close enough" that you wouldn't notice during gameplay, but a true "as new" repair was down to luck more than anything else.
Hopefully, with this tool it will mean that we can recalibrate the controllers to use any pots and don't have to worry getting lucky with the resistances!
I can't wait to try it out!
People comment that they are not very nicely calibrated, so this Tool should help, right?
I haven't installed them yet though I have a pair. It seems to be the case that the Hall effect sticks have jitter (as opposed to drift) which might just be a biproduct of them being based on magnets.
I've only done a little research into them but it appears that there is one set (Not the ali express ones) that don't have jitter, but this is likely due to them having an extra bit of hardware that is dedicated to smoothing it out. (Note: there is an ali express set that also dont have jitter but it appears that the readings you get from these are not uniform. I.e it moves left faster than right)
Since the console controllers were never designed to be used with Hall effect sticks in the first place, I would have my doubts that the reconfig tool would be able to fix this issue (at present). Granted, I don't know what it does (yet).
My instinct is that it essentially re-writes the stored values for "This is the reading for Zero, min and max" rather than doing anything else like flashing with custom firmware. The latter would probably be required to fix jitter (as opposed to drift) as you essentially need to add some algorithm to "smooth" out the noise from the inputs.
That said, it might work. Unfortunately Im not in a position where I can try right now (Just moved home so everything is in boxes) but I will give it a go once I have some time and let you know the results (if nobody else beats me to it)
Edit: Just an additional thought:
The jitter present probably wouldnt cause any issue when the stick is at rest, because most games don't take "raw" input anyway, they have a program specific deadzone. The jitter all occurs within the deadzone so it wouldn't give false readings. The issue would come when you have the sticks in any position other than rest, because the jitter would still be present. Now, whether that jitter is enough to cause distortions in gameplay I couldn't tell you. I'd imagine it would probably be acceptable for low fidelity input games (Action games, platfortmers, rpg or menu based etc.) but perhaps not for high fidelity like fighting games, FPS etc.
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Percentage-wise, it seem my controller got worse, and I redid the tests multiple times. Not only is my left center occasionally pointing north, the stick is also jumping to the northwest at random from just about any other direction. Gonna see if I notice any difference when actually playing though.
Edit: Can confirm, the recalibration thinks it's a good idea to limit my left stick's north direction to half the distance of what it was before, making it somtimes impossible to run forward at full speed in your game of choice. Effectively a lot worse off now than before (luckily I have a new controller anyway).
Edit: Can confirm, the recalibration thinks it's a good idea to limit my left stick's north direction to half the distance of what it was before, making it somtimes impossible to run forward at full speed in your game of choice. Effectively a lot worse off now than before (luckily I have a new controller anyway).
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