PS4 Controller Test
Check a DualShock 4 for stick drift, dead buttons and worn triggers. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Connect your controller and press any button
Plug it in over USB or pair it over Bluetooth, then press any button so your browser can see it. Some browsers only reveal a controller after the first input.
Let go of both sticks completely, then start the check. We'll measure the resting position for a few seconds.
Left stick
Right stick
Buttons
Labels read Xbox / PlayStation / Nintendo, because the underlying layout is index-based rather than brand-based.
Triggers
Live axis readout
| Axis | Mapping | Value |
|---|
Why DualShock 4 sticks drift, and what a good reading looks like
The DualShock 4 is the controller that made stick drift a household phrase, and the reason is mechanical rather than mysterious. Its module is a potentiometer of the same family fitted to the Xbox One pad and the Switch Pro, but the DS4 wears through it faster in practice for two compounding reasons: the sticks sit under a shallower thumb angle, so more of your force goes sideways into the pivot instead of down the shaft, and the concave rubber cap splits along its rim and lets grit into the housing underneath. A DS4 that has done a few hundred hours of shooters normally drifts on the left stick first, in whichever direction that player strafes most.
A DualShock 4 in good order rests inside about 0.020 on both sticks with your thumbs off the pad, and PlayStation firmware applies no deadzone before the browser sees the value, so what the plots above show is the raw hardware. The check flags anything past 0.080. Values between those two are a stick that is genuinely worn but that most games will still hide behind their own deadzone — the reading to watch over the following months rather than the one to act on today.
The two hardware revisions matter once you decide to repair rather than replace. The launch CUH-ZCT1 from 2013 and the CUH-ZCT2 from 2016 — the one with the light bar visible as a strip through the touchpad — use different boards, so a replacement stick module or a Hall-effect kit has to match the revision. Both report to this page identically, as vendor 054c with product 05c4 or 09cc, so read the model number moulded into the plastic on the back of the pad rather than trusting what the browser prints.
Sony's twelve-month limited warranty ran from the date of purchase, so it has long expired for essentially every DS4 still in circulation, and the pad is out of production. That combination actually makes the DS4 the best self-repair candidate on this site: modules, tri-wing drivers, replacement rubber caps and Hall-effect kits are all cheap and plentiful, and the board is reachable in a few minutes. One browser quirk to expect first, though — in non-standard mapping some browsers surface L2 and R2 as axes rather than as analog buttons 6 and 7. If the trigger bars stay flat while the live axis table moves as you squeeze, that is a mapping quirk, not a fault.
Check whether a game would hide the offset with the deadzone visualizer, or read how to fix controller stick drift.
