Very easy to install other than a simple wire soldering job. I play a lot of racing games and bought this kit to specifically reduce the joystick dead zones.
Noteworthy items encountered during the installation:
- The solder pad where the wire from the thumbstick cap was soldered on had a protective plastic coating on it which had to be scrapped off (on the OEM steamdeck thumbsticks). (Steamdeck build ~Aug 2022?). Once that coating was carefully scrapped off, I was able to perform the soldering without any further issues.
- After the GuliKit thumbsticks were installed, I calibrated them as per the instructions. Once I went into the steamdeck testing menu, I found that the thumbsticks were not consistently returning to the absolute zero postion. One had an issue 30% of the time, the other 5% of the time. This was very consistent unfortunately and I wasn't able to reduce my dead zone setting by very much because of this issue. I found another set of instructions online which also included a step to open desktop mode on the steamdeck and run in a console this command: "thumbstick_cal". After following the steps given while running that command, I returned back into deck mode and tested the thumbsticks. Now, no matter how many times I tried (250+ times per stick), both of the thumbsticks _always_ returned back to absolute zero. I was able to reduce the dead zone even lower than what is shown in my photo. This has made a nice difference in my precision driving games.