Hardware My First OLED HWFLY Installation, and a Few Thoughts

[randy_w]

Greetings! Just received my mod chip today and immediately installed it on my OLED switch, and it booted up instantly.
Long story short I ordered the OLED special chip (without USB header, locked) by mistake, and was a bit worried about it being unstable. Turns out it's way better than I expected. It glitches and boots instantly every single time (purple LED flashes 3-5 times and it's done). My only complaint is the QSB for point A and D are a bit off, doesn't align properly so I had to solder jumper wires to these points (see photo for details). It would be great if they also expose point A, C and D on pcb so you can solder to them directly.

This is the OLED special chip I ordered:

I noticed some sellers are including a newer variant of the QSB, not sure if that fixes the misalignment issue.

My installation picture:

As you can see I used some jumper wire to solder to those pads on QSB, also the part extends to 3.3v and gnd points is a bit too long and arches up.
I ended up throwing away the metal shield for soc and ram chips cause I wrapped it so bad during teardown and I can't even flatten it. Besides I think direct contact from heatpipe to the die also helps cooling. If anyone know how to remove the EMI shield please let me know. I still have another oled switch waiting to be modded lol.

And success! Instant boot baby.

So some final thoughts:
Flashable oled chip is the best option since you can update its firmware. The oled special chip isn't that bad if you have one, just hoping they could improve the QSB in the future or expose all points on PCB so you can solder to them directly.

Btw is it normal that hekate feels a bit laggy and joycons don't work on oled model? On original unpatched switch everything's smooth.

 

[randy_w]

A quick follow up:

Had a few failed boot attempts today, LED flashes purple for like 10 times then turns red. Measuring with multimeter shows point D voltage drop decreased to about 100mV (nominal value should be around 700mV according to installation video on youtube). I think QSB is causing this problem so I decided to remove it. Turns out point A C and D are actually exposed on the modchip, just not labelled. Here are soldering pads for point A C and D (figured out the pinout myself with multimeter), they are right next to the ribbon connector.

No need to purchase the special breakout ribbon cable, just solder to the modchip directly.

And my OLED is back to life. Shook it around and rebooted for like 20 times, instant boot every single time. There's a no sd error popped up once, no idea how that happened tho.

Hope this helps those bought the oled "special" chip.

 

[fragged]

Btw is it normal that hekate feels a bit laggy and joycons don't work on oled model? On original unpatched switch everything's smooth.

Yes, that is normal. Though the Joy Con's should work in Hekate, hell they even work when put in backwards. CTCaer sure did think of everything that people could do with their Switch.

 

[randy_w]

Yes, that is normal. Though the Joy Con's should work in Hekate, hell they even work when put in backwards. CTCaer sure did think of everything that people could do with their Switch.

Yeah I remember on my unpatched switch joycons would vibrate when entering hekate and you can control a pointer on screen with left stick and select with A. That didn't happen on my oled switch when I booted hekate the first time. Just tried entering hekate again and now joycons work. No idea what happened.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Yes, that is normal. Though the Joy Con's should work in Hekate, hell they even work when put in backwards. CTCaer sure did think of everything that people could do with their Switch.

How do you even put them in backwards?

 

[randy_w]

How do you even put them in backwards?

I think that means you slide left joy con in the right rail, and right joy con in the left rail, with buttons facing backwards. Tired that and indeed you can still control the pointer in hekate. IIRC they won't even get recognized if you put them backwards in official system. Interesting little feature

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I think that means you slide left joy con in the right rail, and right joy con in the left rail, with buttons facing backwards. Tired that and indeed you can still control the pointer in hekate. IIRC they won't even get recognized if you put them backwards in official system. Interesting little feature

I didn't even know that was possible.
They're definitely still connected wirelessly though. I guess HOS detects that something was plugged in but can't communicate so it gives up.