You need to bridge a few pins in the controller connector. There's several ways to do that as shown in that link. Then you can upload jailbreak software from a PC.

I personally used aluminum foil successfully, then bought an actual jig later.

[–] whostosay@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Huh, I did just skim through that but I didn't see why you would want to bridge the connection, what exactly does bridging accomplish? Is it some sort of maintenance mode or something?

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Basically.

So the Switch uses an Nvidia Tegra X1 chip to power it, which isn't the only device nor the first that it was used for. The Nvidia Shield TV and Google Pixel C (tablet) used it too. On those devices holding down a certain button at boot would put it in a special mode that let it boot from code sent over USB.

The Switch simply did not have this button, but by shorting those pins you send the same signal.

This is a very low level hardware feature so Nintendo couldn't ever patch it with an update. They had to make new hardware to fix it.

[–] whostosay@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Ah okay, thanks for taking the time. That's the answer I was after. That's pretty crafty.