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Nintendo IT Games Technology

Nintendo Is Repairing Left Joy-Cons With ... a Piece of Foam? (polygon.com) 90

Posted by msmash from the a-piece-of-foam dept.
While Nintendo remains silent on the issue of some left Joy-Con controllers becoming desynced from the Switch console, it appears it has a solution for those affected. No, it's not avoidance of aquariums or all other wireless devices; instead, it's apparently as simple as a foam sticker placed in the right spot. From a report: Early reviews and, later, actual retail units of the Nintendo Switch highlighted an apparent hardware flaw in the design of the left Joy-Con controller. In certain scenarios -- like when played some distance from the console using the Joy-Con Grip -- some left Joy-Cons could lose sync and players would find themselves unable to accurately control what's happening on the screen. While a day one console update fixed this issue for some, it's remained for others and Nintendo has done little to assuage would-be consumers that it's solved the issue for good. But, a Joy-Con sent in for repair by CNET's Sean Hollister was returned with one small enhancement a week later and -- lo and behold -- it works. That enhancement: A small piece of conductive foam.
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Nintendo Is Repairing Left Joy-Cons With ... a Piece of Foam? More

Nintendo Is Repairing Left Joy-Cons With ... a Piece of Foam?

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  • What, you want a complex repair? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22, 2017 @03:52PM (#54091165)

    What, is a simple, cost-effective, and suitable repair not sufficient? Do you want a huge, complex, costly repair technique used instead?

    You remind me of the "programmers" (I use the term lightly!) who need to a accomplish a simple task, yet build a huge monstrosity using Ruby on Rails and JavaScript that takes a month to finish.

    Meanwhile, a real programmer just writes a 10 line Python script that does the exact same thing, and is done within 5 minutes.

    It's like you want the expensive, impractical, delayed, Ruby on Rails type of solution when a simple Python script will actually do much better.

    • Re:What, you want a complex repair? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BronsCon ( 927697 ) <social@bronstrup.com> on Wednesday March 22, 2017 @04:02PM (#54091251) Journal
      Right? The amount of shit I take for spending an hour writing and testing Bash scripts for deployment automation, instead of spending weeks learning and implementing $ci_tool_of_the_day, is insane! In the entirety of my career, I don't think I've spent as long writing and maintaining deployment scripts, for all of my projects, combined, as I'd have spent learning, installing, configuring, tracking down plugins for, testing, and fixing $ci_tool_of_the_day just once. And that, even, is ignoring the fact that, by the time the next project rolls around, $ci_tool_of_the_day will have changed and I'll still take shit for using the old tool on the new project.

      Just because something is newer, or bigger, or flashier, or more expensive does not make it better! If you have something old, well-tested, reliable, small, lightweight, efficient, even if it's boring and free, that does the job in less time than another solution, the other solution is not better.

      Conductive foam is cheap, it's been around for years, we know its properties, we know how it works, and it solves this problem. Like you, I think Nintendo made the right choice in implementing this fix.

      I still think the Switch is an abysmal failure in design, but that's beside the point; this fix is good.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TWX ( 665546 )

        I hear you on the scripting. I keep thinking I may need to teach myself Expect, but on the other hand I've managed to brute-force my way though well enough with Bash that so far it hasn't actually been necessary.

        We constantly have to fight with the property control folks that miss our devices and try to claim we must've pulled 'em. It took a couple of hours to write something that could scan the IP ranges for the switches and build lists, then SSH into the devices to get hostname, model, and serial number

      • No! You are wrong! You are using OLD technology, which makes it automatically inferior to the framework that came out just this week! Oh, it has bugs? That's fine, we'll just reimplement the solution with the new framework that invariably comes out the following week!

        This 'new is good old is bad' is so completely wrong, and yet it's so hard to fight against because the entire thing is based on emotional needs and desires rather than reality. And then people are surprised that modern day software is dem

        • It's one of the leading factors behind my motivation to stop working for someone else and start working for myself. After almost 3 years, the workload has increased to the point where I'm getting ready to build a team; my biggest fear is that I won't be able to find anyone who knows how to use what works.

          • Worse is when clients actively insist that you want to use whatever technology du jour.

            "Oooh oooh! I've heard this mongo db thing is amazing! I want to use that!"
            "But... we're writing a financial application where data integrity is cri...."
            "MONGODB DAMMIT"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ameoba ( 173803 )

      As they say, "if it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid".

  • I don't know, are they? (Score:5, Funny)

    by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2017 @03:52PM (#54091167) Homepage

    Nintendo Is Repairing Left Joy-Cons With ... a Piece of Foam?

    Are you asking a question or making a statement?

    Slashdot is... going down the toilet?

    • Slashdot is... going down the toilet?

      Nah, that happened long ago.

      Now it's coming back up.

    • Slashdot is... going down the toilet?

      Slashdot is ... quoting the headline of the source article?

      Yeah, let's go with that one.

    • Nintendo Is Repairing Left Joy-Cons With ... a Piece of Foam?

      Are you asking a question or making a statement?

      Slashdot is... going down the toilet?

      You might want to read it again, but this time read it like this "Nintendo Is Repairing Left Joy-Cons With ... a Piece of Foam. Really??"

      See... when read like this it's a statement of amazement that something relatively minor and simple could fix, what seems to be, a technical problem. Most people would expect that a technical problem like this would require a technical fix. For example, soldering on a new antenna, etc. So, the title author used the question mark as a placeholder for a modifier that sho

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        It's a common writing technique, yes - one that I would prefer Slashdot not to use.

        We have shitty clickbait headlines on almost every website. Slashdot could choose to distinguish itself by not playing that game. Many here wish that they would abandon the "excited teenager" style of prose in favor of clear statements of facts.

      • Re:I don't know, are they? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Razed By TV ( 730353 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2017 @07:15PM (#54092393)

        This is a common enough writing technique that I'm surprised that anyone would have a hard time understanding its use...

        Yes, yes, but that's pretty much been the viral clickbait trend that won't die.
        "You won't believe how THIS asshole got 1 million viewers on his website!"
        "Lose 100 pounds by eating THIS! {picture of unidentifiable fruit}"
        "Wow, Nintendo fixed their new console with FOAM!"

        God forbid you put the word "conductive" in front of foam, lest you make things sound intelligent and scare away readers!
        Tomorrow I get to hear dumbass radio jock tell the world about fixing electronics with foam. And then I'll get to hear my coworkers talk about how they wonder why nobody used foam to fix things sooner, because foam has been around forever, right?

    • to be fair... the linked article has the same title?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sconeu ( 64226 )

      Christopher Walken is... writing the headlines?

    • Slashdot is... going down the toilet?

      No, because Betteridge.

    • Let me answer everything in your post?

      yes?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      Well, given the fact its a link to bloody kotaku instead of the actual source...

  • Uh, people... (Score:5, Informative)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2017 @03:53PM (#54091171)
    Don't play Nintendo in front of your aquariums. You're giving fishes the wrong impression about humanity.

  • This is why i didn't buy day 1 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jediborg ( 4808835 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2017 @04:23PM (#54091405)
    Statement from nintendo: "A manufacturing variation has resulted in wireless interference with a small number of the left Joy-Con. Moving forward this will not be an issue, as the manufacturing variation has been addressed and corrected at the factory level. We have determined a simple fix can be made to any affected Joy-Con to improve connectivity."

    This is why i'm waiting for a 'Switch lite' or 'Switch SP', or 'NEW Switch XL' to be released before buying the console. Releasing this console in march was basically Nintendo doing a 'soft-launch' this way they sell out day one, knowing all the die hard fanboys will buy it day one, and they get to work out the kinks in the hardware before the holiday season when they have the 'Real Launch' or 'Grand Opening' of the device with less manufacturing defects, and can ensure they have adequate supply for the people who will buy it during holiday season.

    • Re:This is why i didn't buy day 1 (Score:5, Funny)

      by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2017 @05:30PM (#54091835) Homepage Journal

      Moving forward this will not be an issue

      Right. It's moving right that's the issue.

    • I preordered mine and played the new Zelda from day one. No regrets, haven't seen the sun since, never been happier.

      • That's nice. But for those of us who aren't Zelda fans that launch titles are an epic bore. I'm just waiting for some decent games to become available before I buy it.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Actually back in the day, this happened just as often, if not MORE often. I remember having to blow into Nintendo cartridges, and their loading slot was an obvious design failure, one they would fix.... 6 years later. Today the consumers would be complaining on-line within weeks, Nintendo would have to release a statement within the month promising to fix the issue. And no less than 2 months later we would have NES consoles with manufacturing improvements and 6 months later we would have an NES with a top-l
  • Be thankful.. next time they will be 2 matchsticks. (Race to the bottom never ends!)

  • RROD and overheating processors (Score:3, Informative)

    by phorm ( 591458 ) on Wednesday March 22, 2017 @05:28PM (#54091825) Journal

    A lot of early fixes for RROD and overheating processors included some pretty simple solutions
    a) A strong "clamp" or a copper shim to more tightly hold the GPU on, so that it wouldn't come loose when the solder heated up
    b) Changing the fan behavior to be more aggressive to keep the device cooler

    There were a lot of people offering services to fix early XBoxes and all it really involved was heating things up so that the chip would slip back in better, then jamming a nice thick piece of copper in place to hold the chip on tighter while still conducting heat away.

    • Yes. My Dell XPS M1330 (going on memory on the model as that was a few years ago) had problems with the Nvidia GPU and heat. The system fan would almost always run on high. There were also many mb failures reported. I put a copper shim between the GPU and the heat sink.

      I used a copper tube strap for copper pipes from Menards. Pounded it flat and cut a piece to size.

      Ta-da. Problem solved.

      • Was the GPU a 7900? I had the same problem along with screen corruption. Solution was to remove the entire GPU unit and bake it in the oven for 20 mins at 450deg. The solder reflowed and it was OK again for another year. Was a really bad design.

  • Looks like the workaround we used to use in FM radios back in the day, when reception was poor: a piece of steel wool in the antenna works like a charm!

  • Completely oriented and clickbait title.

    Yes, it's foam ... so what ? First, it's not basic foam, it is conductive foam. Second, it fixes the issue.

    I call that an elegant solution.

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