Hacking Hardware Tutorial
Updated
Tilt Switch RCM Hardmod
Tilt It to Hack It: An RCM Hardmod for Your Right Joy-Con
A Collaborative Project by @0xAgon and @ramblecube
Introduction
Nintendo Switch users seeking to use the system’s recovery mode (known as “RCM”) have needed to press two buttons that exist on the system to do so- but a third and final button is not easily accessible. Historically, there have been several options for achieving this final button press, including the use of a “jig” (which can be purchased or even crudely made) or a physical hardmod.
We propose an alternative method that requires no “jig” but is more interactive than a traditional physical hardmod. Simply tilt your right Joy-Con upside-down- no jig!
* See ADDENDUM below for technical details, potential quirks, and project information/background. Remember - this is at your own risk!
Tutorial
Skills Needed
- Experience with soldering
- Steady hands
- Comfort with disassembly
Supplies Needed
- SW-200D Tilt Switch (very common, can be found on Amazon [1, 2, 3])
- 30 AWG Wire (also common, Amazon [1, 2, 3])
- A soldering kit
- Soldering iron
- Solder
- Fume extractor
- A Tri-Point Y00 screwdriver (sold on iFixit and Amazon [1,2])
- A JIS-000 screwdriver (sold on iFixit and Amazon [1,2])
- Phillips 000 can work as well, but it will end up stripping the screw
- Wire cutting/stripping tool
- (Optional) A pair of tweezers
Goal
In order to accomplish this hardmod, you will need to install a tilt switch into the right Joy-Con.
You will first disassemble the right Joy-Con. Then, you will prepare the tilt switch for installation. Finally, you will install the tilt switch. After that, you can reassemble the controller and test your hardmod.
(1) Disassembling the controller
Prepare your right Joy-Con
First, locate a right Joy-Con that you are comfortable with disassembling and modifying. It is essential that a right Joy-Con is used. This WILL void your warranty.
It is also important that you are using a genuine right-side Nintendo Joy-Con. While this hardmod is almost certainly possible in third-party controllers, this tutorial does not cover them.
Removing the plastic covers and disconnecting the battery
The team at iFixit has prepared an excellent guide for this task.
Complete the steps in the guide, up to and including removing the battery connector. Do not move on to removing the battery cell itself. Leave the cell in place.
Here is the guide: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Joy-Con+Battery+Replacement/113634 (Link not working? Try this copy of the guide from the Internet Archive.)
Removing the charging rail
The charging rail should be removed from the back shell for ease of access while soldering. In our case, we are removing the charging rail from the rear shell, but the flat, brown ribbon cables will remain connected to the Joy-Con’s main board.
This can be accomplished by following step 7– and only step 7– of another guide from iFixit. Step 7 of this guide will tell you to use an #000 Phillips screwdriver to remove the screws, but it is preferable to use a JIS-000 screw, as a Phillips head will strip the JIS screws.
Here’s a link to the guide: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Left+Joy-Con+Charging+Rail+Replacement/142938 (Link not working? Try this copy of the guide from the Internet Archive.)
Removing the protective foam from the pin pads
On previously unmodified right Joy-Cons, there is a small square portion of foam covering the pin pads on the charging rail. You will need to remove this foam square. It can be removed by simply pulling it away from the charging rail. Refer to this image, where the foam has already been removed:
(2) Preparing your Tilt Switch
Clipping the Legs
Your tilt switch has two metal legs extruding from it. They need to be clipped so that the tilt switch can fit inside the right Joy-Con.
The legs should be clipped so that about 3mm/0.1in of length remains. The wires you prepare in the next step will wrap around the remaining stubs.
Here is an example image of the tilt switch in a complete hardmod. As you can see, the legs are obscured completely by the solder “blob”. The space constraint for the tilt switch itself is quite tight, so optimizing the leg length is crucial.
Using your wire cutting tool, clip the tilt switch legs to this length.
(3) Preparing your Wires
You will need to cut and prepare two wires using your wire cutting/stripping tool. They should each be about 45mm (1.75in) long.
There is a silver and a gold leg on the tilt switch. When choosing your colors of wire, it is recommended that you choose a similar color scheme. The solder will obscure the original leg colors, so color coding the wire allows the ends to be easily identifiable. In our case, a yellow wire was soldered to the gold leg, and a black wire was soldered to the silver leg.
The ends of the wires should be stripped. This is to allow the wrapping of the bare wire around the legs, which you cut in the previous step.
(4) Wrap and Solder your Wires Around the Tilt Switch Legs
Pick up one of your wires.
Take one of the ends and wrap the exposed metal portion around one leg of your tilt switch.
Make sure you are connecting the correct color wire to the correct color leg.
Using your soldering tools, solder the wrapped wire and the leg together.
Repeat this wrapping and soldering process with your other wire, attaching it to the remaining leg of the tilt switch.
You should now have a tilt switch whose legs have essentially been replaced by two short wires.
(5) Solder your Wires to the Pin Pads
Examine the pin pads that were exposed when you removed the protective foam square.
You will now be soldering the exposed ends of your two wires to these pads. You will solder the first wire’s exposed end to pin 1 (called “ground” or “GND”), and the second wire’s exposed end to pin 10.
Disclaimer: In our implementation, we connected the yellow wire (gold end) to pin 1, which is ground. As confusing as that is in terms of circuit design, it was done because that wire is closest to pin 1. In order for the whole mod to be in an “upside-down activated” configuration, the gold end of the tilt switch has to go to the top, which naturally places the yellow wire in the position where pin 1 (ground) is the most accessible one. You can make the decision of if the black (bottom) wire should go to ground, but that will require some complex wire management around the pins.
On the left side of this diagram is our implementation, and the right is an alternative that respects the black-to-ground convention.
Securing the wire
It can be difficult to keep the exposed portion of a wire in place while soldering. We found that wrapping the exposed end of the wire around a pin before soldering helped to secure the wire in place.
Routing your wires
When routing your two wires, it is important to route them around the correct side of the ribbon cable connecting the main board and the charging rail. This is because, when the Joy-Con is reassembled, wires placed on the incorrect side of the ribbon cable will end up sticking out of the Joy-Con shell near the connector pins.
(6) Securing the Tilt Switch
Now the tilt switch should be secured so that it does not move around in the case during gameplay. You could use a small blob of hot glue to secure the tilt switch in place:
IMPORTANT: It is crucial, at this step, to affix the tilt switch so that the gold pin faces the top of the controller, and the silver pin faces the bottom of the controller.
You’re done! Before reassembling the Joy-Con using the iFixit guide from step 1, you may also choose to cover the pin pads with hot glue to insulate them and to keep your wires from coming off the pins.Addendum (credit to @0xAgon)
(1) Quirks and implications
Q: Any implications?
As with most other hard mods, this mod also prevents the Joy-Con from working in “attached” mode while the Switch is flipped upside down. Whenever the switch is turned and the mod is activated, the Switch will instantly disconnect the Joy-Con and transition to wireless connection. While this is almost seamless, it can be a hassle since if only the right Joy-Con goes into wireless mode, the left one will no longer recognize the right one as its pair.
In normal usage, this kind of orientation should not happen very often. However, it can occur occasionally when you are playing while lying down, as the ball can freely move up and down the switch. This flaw is inherent to the design, and the modder should keep this quirk in mind.
Also, because there is quite literally a ball in the Joy-Con, the Joy-Con will make rattling sounds when you shake it. It can be good or bad, depending on your taste in musical instruments.
(2) How we got here & how this all works
Q: So what is the mysterious third button after all?
The Switch (both Erista and Mariko) goes into RCM whenever a key combination of volume up and the Tegra home button is held down while it boots. The volume up key is readily accessible – it is the volume button that is right next to the power button. The problem – what prompted us to start this journey – is the Tegra home button, as it is not physically accessible on the switch or the Joy-Cons. The home button you see on the right Joy-Con is the switch home button, not for the Tegra processor.
Q: What can one do to access the home button?
Because of the physical inaccessibility of the Tegra home button, we need to implement a way to produce the same input. The input that a supposed Tegra home button would produce is fairly simple: it brings pin number 10 low. It is usually set high – which is to say that electricity flows through the pin. Pressing the button is represented as the pin being brought low; and we can bring it low ourselves by bridging it to ground. Hence, most jigs, and by extension this hardmod, simulate the button press by bridging pins number 1 and 10 on the right Joy-Con.
The reason why we chose pin 1 is because of the physical layout. It is simply easier to solder them when we get as much space between the pins as possible. It is also one of the combinations that do not need a resistor, which makes the electrical design easier.
(3) Orientation of the Tilt Switch
The tilt switch closes depending on its orientation. The orientation for each position is notated by the positions of the gold and silver legs – if the gold leg is oriented below the silver leg, then the switch is closed.
Q: Why this over existing jigs?
- Jigs can potentially damage the pins on the switch’s Joy-Con rail.
- Even if it is not a direct deformation, it still scratches up the rail contact.
- You would not want this happening, since replacing the switch side rail is quite the process.
- If successful, you would no longer have to carry a separate jig.
- The reliability of the contact is as good as it gets
- Because jigs are always third-party and don't go through quite the same quality control that Nintendo does on the Joy-Cons, the jigs' contacts are not very reliable.
- This mod uses an actual Joy-Con's rail contact pins in terms of the interface between it and the Switch, so the contact is very reliable.
- The Joy-Con does not get forced into wireless mode permanently
- The most common method of hardmodding the Joy-Con is permanently bridging pin 10 to a ground. Since the Switch only takes wireless connections from a Joy-Con that has those pins bridged, it will permanently stay that way.
- This will in turn prevent the left Joy-Con from recognizing the wireless right one as its pair, which makes playing games in handheld mode challenging if not impossible.
Q: How did we get here?
At first, the most important goal of this project was to design an alternative to jigs, so that one can minimize the damage a bad jig might cause to their switch-side Joy-Con rails. However, that is not to say that there was only one approach to reaching the goal.
We had two different sets of ideas for how to reach the goal and flesh out the product. One was an active approach, and the other was passive – the product of which is described on this document. Although the passive design is much easier to physically make, it was also the least versatile option.
The active approach, on the other hand, was designed to be the “do-it-all”. The planned features were RCM entry by Joy-Con button combination, pushing payloads, and being able to have the payloads updated through bluetooth or similar wireless means. This, however, was met with a huge roadblock: It needed some sort of a microcontroller that could do all these jobs, but the space constraint within the Joy-Con was very hard to work with. This, coupled with the logistic complicity of pushing the payload (which will most likely have to go through the USB-C port anyway), was what ultimately kept us from going down that path.
After we determined it would be hard to realize the active design, we got to brainstorming a unique way to transform a Joy-Con into an inconspicuous and portable alternative to jigs. “Breaking” the security of the switch by flipping the console upside-down seemed like a fun idea, and as you can see, it worked out perfectly.
Still, a big question remains: Is the active design possible? This would be akin to putting a whole payload injector dongle into a Joy-Con. We will most likely have to design a new backshell for the Joy-Con to make space for a microcontroller, a USB port to which the user can attach a USB-C male-male cable to connect to the switch, and some way to piggyback off of the power that the Joy-Con battery.
Here, we would like to request help from the community members who have experience designing payload injector dongles. The difficulty of trying to integrate a payload injector dongle into a Joy-Con is proving to be quite the obstacle, especially because we do not have experience building a dongle in the first place.
Last edited by ramblecube,
