Hacker News Reader

Comment by Veliladon | Hacker News Reader

I will die on the hill that hall effect control sticks and triggers are superior to pots. SEGA used them on the Saturn and Dreamcast controller sticks and triggers and they were awesome. It's good to see Gulikit making OEM stick parts and OEMs like NYXI putting them into products like the Wizard.

View on HN

For the game controller context, anyone who thinks otherwise has probably never taken apart an old potentiometer, and looked inside at the carnage. Things scraping together, wearing each other away, until they fail in a non graceful way.

Solid state analog is hard to beat, in low current devices, with human speed dB/dt.

Hah you don't even need to take one apart

Just get an old radio, fiddle with the volume control and hear the scratching

Atari pioneered the use of Hall effect joysticks in the arcade I Robot from 1983. I think they had a patent on it at the time.

There are interesting stories online about the problems they had. They were stumped by a game at a specific location that kept going haywire and requiring recalibration. Kept sending engineers out to fix it over and over. Turned out the arcade was next door to a scrap yard with one of those big magnetic cranes, which was completely messing up the sensing. [1]

[1] https://www.rotheblog.com/2009/06/arcade/transcript-from-rus...

Good story, but it’s unlikely it was the (magnetic part of the) Hall effect sensor at fault here — the field due to a magnetic dipole (like a lifting magnet) drops off as an inverse cube of distance. Unless the machines were IN the scrapyard, the field would be negligible.

More likely boring old electrical grounding issues. Oh how I hate them.

I don't think it's necessary to die on the hill of the popular opinion you hold.

Unless you live in Iran of course.

Not if it's popular there too!

not all popular opinions are popular inside the government

I mean there is nothing to argue here they are, they are just pricier alternative

There's also some work being done to retrofit hall effect sensors in older game consoles, like the GameCube [0], I'm definitely going to try it in one of my older controllers sooner or later, I'm tired of replacing pots. I just had to purchase replacements for an orange controller and a wavebird.

[0]: https://github.com/PhobGCC/PhobGCC-SW

And then there is the N64 which used optical chopper rotary encoders in it's stick. It is a weird design, you can tell the engineers were trying to figure out how to make a small joystick and managed to do it with ball mouse tech. Don't get me wrong the stick still sucked, but it was the mechanical pivot that wore out not the detectors.

Okay I have almost zero hardware chops but this sings to me.

Does that mean that the sensor is all solid state and the only moving bit is just a gimbal-like thingy attached to the rubber thumb interface to move a little magnet around? That’s got to be ridiculously simple and long-lasting. Or even trivial to make replaceable without having to replace any of the electronics.

That was literally why the infamous hall effect keyboard switches of Honeywell were designed. Keyboard were required to be very robust, and switches that required direct interaction were found lacking in reliability.

Thus no-touch, special integrated circuit per key, hall effect keyboards were born before the advent of cheapness and higher reliabilty of mechanical switches drove them out due to price difference.

There are still modern keyboards using Hall effect switches, e.g., https://wooting.io/lekker

Why are they infamous? It seems from your post they were more reliable, even if they were more expensive.

If you spend some time in keyboard aficionado circles, you will find a lot of talk about them, especially in relation to (similarly infamous) Knight, Space Cadet, and other Lisp Machine keyboards.

Thus "infamous".

The fact that they required special IC per key only makes them even more "wild" :)

Wait, pots are still used in game controllers? I would've thought they'd all have given way to 3D Hall sensors by now.

Unfortunately, yes. And they wear out fairly frequently, too.

Wow, that's mindblowing. I haven't considered using pots for anything in almost 15 years. Sliding contacts? No thank you.

Just today I diagnosed my truck's failed climate control to be due to a failed potentiometer in the temperature control mix damper actuator. Curse on whoever screwed up and didn't use a magnetic sensor for this application.

The very popular Nintendo Switch is infamous for dying controllers. I've had to replace the thumb stick twice within three years, and we weren't even using it that much. The Playstation 5 also them, and I've had to replace it once. No idea whether Xbox uses them though, but I would not be surprised if they did.

What's funny is that, the controllers are already pretty effin expensive. Buying a new single PS5 controller is ca 1/6 cost of the console. With the Switch it's even worse, then it's about 1/3.

Who said they screwed up? The engineer could well have suggest the right solution, but management saw an opportunity to Design for Repair. No one builds things to last anymore, particularly not cars.

It might be changing, at least to a degree. It's now possible to buy at least two third-party cross-platform controllers that use Hall effect sticks (that I can think of). I don't know when we'll see them again in first-party controllers, though.

8bitdo released their Ultimate Controller and the bluetooth edition has hall-effect joysticks.

I think drift may have actually gotten worse, modern systems don't seem to do the same boot time self calibration old systems did.

I really hope to see more come out of this

Reply on news.ycombinator.com