Oudini Combo V1.4 (Bowl + Stick)
Get set for life with Stainless Steel parts, the fresh new Oudini Joystick and Bowl Combo ! Oud..
200.00€ Free Shipping
Get set for life with Stainless Steel parts, the fresh new Oudini Joystick and Bowl Combo ! Oud..
200.00€ Free Shipping
The center of the joystick is in my opinion the most crucial part of a joystick design. I believe this sphere and the corridors are where the main design choices are made. Also, contrary to urban legends, most of the neutral play (physical deadzone) is due to the interactions of the gate with the center sphere, gears wear way later.
Picture 1: Nintendo was making sticks that don't use the pins of the gate to manage play. Very wide and deep corridors. In this design the center sphere of the joystick is touching the plastic gate of the module (blue circle). That interaction determines if the joystick is tight. The problem of this design is the sharp interaction at the base of the pins. Another problem on OEM is that bowl wearing down lowers the sphere of the stick and creates more distance to module's gate.
Picture 2 : First idea of an optimal design is to tighten the stick shape around the pins. The stick has then 2 possible contact points: the pins and the blue circle. Wear of the gate gets reduced. Also makes very tight joystick. First steel prototype was of this design. Cosmeticaly perfect, but difficult to play on, very sensitive on small inputs, difficult Flicking and snapback. Even if the stick looks really premium being so tight, I don't want to produce something if I don't want to play on it. I have ideas to test to make it work in the future.
Picture 3 : Decision was taken to space out from gate and pins equaly for V1. The joystick then feels a bit more loose than previous design, it's closer to a fresh OEM. It gives a lot more control over engaging low inputs slowly, lighter feel, helps for aiming. Flicks are more forgiving and don't snapback. Spacing out just a tiny bit offers great shaft design option for weight reduction.
The shaft of the oudini stick is slightly thinner than OEM shaft. Both because the goal is to provide around +4 on all values and because reintroducing play reduces max values. So this makes a great opportunity to have a slightly thinner and lighter shaft without going crazy with values. Thinner shaft also means that the notches give a stronger hit when the stick locks in. The shaft also weights less and especially at the very top. When weight is distributed far from the pivot point it increases the impacts on how heavy the stick is to move. It is also a strategic weight-reduction to reduce snapback force.
Thickness of the hammer and of cylinder rule play for gears, those are adjusted to be tight. On another hand the height of the hammer is a decision to make. If too tall it's blocked between bowl and small gear. Shorter hammer height gives Z play to the stick, as in pulling it up. Z play doesn't impact physical deadzone or input values and offers room to free snapback energy without creating inputs. Reducing the size of the hammer is a strategic weight reduction, far away from the pivot point of the stick has stronger impact on both snapback and on joystick weight-feel. This is in line with the other V1 decisions for low weight and weight-feel.
The nib of the stick is the contact point with the bowl. Making it out of steel would be a problem for steel-bowl users. Therefore the nib is made out of a mix of Delrin(POM) and Teflon(PTFE), the two plastic polymers with the lowest friction. The nib is made by injection molding, in a very precise mold, extremely polished (as much as the sticks) to have the contact point with the bowl be perfectly smooth. The rectangle design fits right in the gear while being closer to the bowl's curve than a spherical design would be.
The first idea was to not include caps, The stick is compatible with SteelSticks64 caps the offer there is of great cosmetic and functionnal quality and perfect variety of colors to match shells. I don't want to compete but I still want to propose a cap with the sticks. My engineer is a big fan of 3D printing so we tried some designs and after some prototypes we feel good about one of them. 3D print makes the cap cosmeticaly weak at very close distance. The oudini cap is meant to be smooth and grippy while very price competitive, soft feel but grippy because 3D print is not smooth surface, especialy on the bumps.
The Oudini Bowl is made out of hardenned stainless steel. The curvy part is then polished to a mirror. Design is not an OEM copy. The drawing explains the main idea. The curve has been adjusted so that the center correspond to the pivot point of the joystick. The strength to be applied on joystick will be more consistant accross the input range. This adjustement also enables better correction of the Z-play which has been the goal for the V1.4 joystick.The enclosure is made out of an OEM enclosure which garantees correct dimensions. Enclosures have bits of plastic fluff from drilling. It would be very tedious to remove properly (tweezers) without danger for the dimensions of the hole. We believe these imperfections are cosmetic and won't impact gameplay. Therefor these cosmetic imperfections are to be expected.
Bowls and enclosures are not attached together. The bowl has been made to sit at the bottom of the module case. This makes the measurements and centering more precise since it removes any gluing mistakes. It won't move inside the case because the entire mechanism is too tight and pushes towards the bottom. The enclosure and bowl combo locks better than OEM in the module. The hole at the bottom of the bowl is made to fit tightly in the middle pin of the module case while the side pins lock the enclosure. The combination of these 3 pins locks the bowl and the enclosure tighter than an OEM bowl. OEM bowl usualy has 0.6mm left right and 0.3mm forward backward of wiggle. The Oudini bowl has 0.1mm if not less. This tightness is important so that the encoder wheels are perfectly still while recording inputs.
Compatibilities : Oudini bowl is compatible with all versions of Oudini stick. OEM stick is barely compatible with bowl, its cap slightly touches the gate on up-right and up-left which might be a problem on a used OEM controller.