Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo Is Repairing Left Joy-Cons With ... a Piece of Foam? (polygon.com)
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.
Don't play Nintendo in front of your aquariums. You're giving fishes the wrong impression about humanity.
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.