HORI announced a special gamepad for Steam / Steam Deck

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: chrIs the desirable alternative thumbstick (that you wish your ideal controller included) here based on irregular potentiometer or capacitive or ldr?

As I understand it, hall-effect magnets, which, as anyone with experience of the Sega Saturn analogue controller knows, can fail too, with some very wacky effects when they do.

Plus it's really inconvenient to have controllers that only work when you're in a hall.

Hey, that's illegal! One dad joke per person per thread - as was agreed in the secret community meeting.

/jk

Quoting: chr

Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: chr

Quoting: JustinWoodand as mentioned above, if they're going to use regular potentiometer sticks, it's just not worth it in my opinion. No matter the build quality, no matter the feature set, no matter the price, there's more than enough e-waste in the world, I don't want to support the use of sticks that are designed to fail at some point.

Sorry, I didn't understand - could you please explain further? I understand a potentiometer is some kind of electronic component. What are regular potentiometer sticks and what is the alternative? What do Steam Controllers use?

I will try to explain them, but I learned these things at school, so they can get somewhat complex and since I don't know how much you know about electronics I'll try to be as simple as I can.
I'm aware this'll affect the quality of the explanation feel free to offer tips.



Lay explanation:
Potentiometer stick is a fancy word for "thumb stick category 4b".
Regular means "Our programmers had to do less work and you still get a functioning product."

Alternatives could've been "irregular poly switch stick"(thumb stick category "our programmers had to do everything themselves"), "capicative stick"(thumb stick with too much fancy tech) and "ldr stick"(We needed a really good excuse for leds around a thumbstick).
Valve also used a potentiometer stick(and soldered it to the main board). Whether or not it's regular I don't know, but for mass production reasons I think so.



Technical explanation:

Basics:
Electronic resistance is measure of how hard it's for electricity to get through it.
Analog measurement methods in electronics often work this way:
Put a predictable amount of power at one side, put a resistor between the power source and your processing unit whose resistance is reliant on the thing you want to measure.

What's happening here specifically
A potentiometer is essentially an electronic resistor of which you can set the amount of resistance with a slider.
If you put two of them in a triangle and connect the sliders to the same stick you can track its stance with math.

What's regular:
regular means in this case that the amount of resistance provided by the potentiometers can be accurately described with R(esistance) = ax+b
where a is the distance removed from one of the sides, x is a constant and b is a constant.

Thank you! And so I understand that it was said initially that regular potentiometer thumbsticks are kinda crap because they inevitably fail eventually and need to be replaced. Is the desirable alternative thumbstick here based on an irregular potentiometer or capacitive or ldr?

As I understand it the primary issue is with the "stick" part, while playing people put too much force on the stick and accidentally destroy it.
Armoring the stick won't work, because then they destroy the sensor, which is harder to replace.
My solution would actually be a really sensitive irregular potentiometer stick, but this time the irregularities wouldn't come from the sensor, but from the stick.
The more the stick goes from the center the more push one would have to give.

An easier, but less user friendly solution would be to make a middle hinged regular potentiometer stick.
Build the stick in such a way that when too much side force is applied to it clicks over.
Stopping the damage and the play session.


Edit:
According to @Pengling stick destruction isn't the issue, but sensor drift.
Usage makes them less accurate, by wearing out the slider.
Hall effect sensors work very well against that.
Ldr could work, but it's actually a technique I pulled out of my butt, so I don't think it will be really good.
An industrial thumbstick would probably combine measure the stance of the stick thrice to software wise correct for drift.

According to wikipedia Pengling is fully in the right and my ldr based technique is also not enough of an improvement to compete.


Last edited by LoudTechie on 2 July 2024 at 8:38 am UTC

Quoting: chr

Quoting: JustinWoodand as mentioned above, if they're going to use regular potentiometer sticks, it's just not worth it in my opinion. No matter the build quality, no matter the feature set, no matter the price, there's more than enough e-waste in the world, I don't want to support the use of sticks that are designed to fail at some point.

Sorry, I didn't understand - could you please explain further? I understand a potentiometer is some kind of electronic component. What are regular potentiometer sticks and what is the alternative? What do Steam Controllers use?

Forgive me for the delay in responding and for reviving this, but I felt it would be unkind of me not to give my explanation to your question. When I said "regular" Potentiometer sticks, I was not using it to describe a specific kind of potentiometer joystick, but rather that the major manufacturers of gamepads have taken to producing them with potentiometer joysticks.

While hall effect sticks can and do fail, but they are a step forward in that unlike a potentiometer joystick, which relies on physical contact with a sensor in order to do its job, a hall effect sensor removes the element of physical contact that would wear down components over time, causing the dreaded issue of stick drift.

That being said, it's not as if all potentiometer joysticks are built the same. I had (and continue to have) perfectly smooth control and no dead zone drift with my Dualshock 4, to the point where the rubber of the joysticks themselves are reaching end of life. And yet, in the same amount of time, I've had multiple Dualsense controllers suffer from stick drift, and the Switch's joycons are notoriously problematic.

Otherwise, I think the other folks have provided plenty of detail to cover the more technical and in depth aspects. Hope this helps, and again, sorry for leaving you hanging for a couple months! ^^;;

Quoting: WhomGyro without needing to swap to a Switch or Dualshock/sense mode is actually huge, there's currently a gap where most third party controllers with gyro are for the Switch and as a result can't use analog triggers along with gyro even if they have both features.

So you're saying you have to Switch between the two?