PS5 controller stick drift fixed - Montrose drop-off

Two PS5 controllers came in from a customer in Montrose, both with the same complaint. Stick drift. If you've not had it yet, count yourself lucky. You put the pad down on the sofa, nobody's touching it, and your player starts wandering off across the telly all on their own. In a shooter your aim slides away from the target. On the menus it can scroll straight past the thing you're after before you've pressed anything.

It's one of the best known faults on the DualSense, the controller that comes with every PS5. Each thumbstick sits on a wee module with two sensors inside it, one reading up and down and the other reading left and right. Between them they tell the console exactly where the stick is. Over time, wear and grime inside those sensors throw the reading off, so the controller reports a tiny bit of movement even when the stick's sitting dead still in the middle. A tiny bit is all it takes. The game thinks you're pushing, and off you go. It can catch either stick, or both at once.

Each controller got our stick drift repair on the bench. Then both went onto the calibration software. Calibrating tells the controller where the middle of each stick is and how far it can travel in every direction, so a stick at rest reads as a stick at rest. It won't cure a worn stick on its own, but skip it after a repair and a perfectly good stick can still sit a touch off centre.

With nobody touching them, the readouts on screen sat at zero for one pad and within a hundredth of zero for the other. Zero means the controller sees the stick bang in the middle, right where it should be with your thumb off it. The software also shows what's inside each controller, and these two weren't a matched pair. One had a BDM-020 board and the other a BDM-030, so they came from different batches. Same fault in both, though.

We also went round every button on both controllers before they went back out, because there's no point fixing the sticks and handing back a pad with a dodgy trigger. The job went on our system on the Friday afternoon, and both pads were ready to collect at Saturday lunchtime. Their owner had them back about ten minutes later.

If your controller's wandering about on its own in every game, not just one, it's the pad and not the game. You don't have to put up with it. Drop it in and we'll take a look.