Gamepad Tester

How to test your controller

1. Connect the gamepad with a USB cable or pair it by Bluetooth.
2. Press any button on it. For privacy reasons, browsers only reveal a controller after its first button press, so a card for the pad appears at that moment. If nothing shows up, press Detect gamepads.
3. Press each button one at a time. Its tile fills up and shows its value from 0.00 to 1.00, and the Pressed counter tells you how many buttons are down right now.
4. Move both sticks in full circles. The dot must reach the edge of the circle in every direction and come back to the centre when you let go.
5. Pull the triggers slowly: on most controllers they are analog, so the value should climb smoothly instead of jumping from 0 to 1.
6. Put the controller down and press Check drift (3 s) to measure how far each stick sits from the centre at rest.
7. Try Weak rumble, Strong rumble and Both motors to check the vibration motors.

You can connect several controllers at once: each one gets its own card, numbered as the browser sees it.

Buttons, axes and the mapping

The browser reports a gamepad as a list of buttons and a list of axes. When it recognises the controller, the Mapping is Standard: the W3C layout where button 0 is the bottom face button (A on Xbox, Cross on PlayStation), 6 and 7 are the triggers, 12 to 15 the D-pad, and axes 0–1 and 2–3 are the left and right sticks. This tool then shows the usual names (A, B, LB, RT, L3, Home…).

When the mapping is Raw (not remapped), the browser passes the controller’s own numbering through. Buttons are shown as B0, B1… and axes by number, and they may not match the printed symbols. That is common with arcade sticks, flight sticks, racing wheels and older USB pads. It doesn’t mean the device is faulty; games that support it usually let you rebind the controls.

Each stick is drawn as a circle with a dashed ring for the dead zone. Below it you can read the raw position and, after the arrow, the value a game would use once the Dead zone slider is applied.

Stick drift and dead zones

Stick drift is when a released stick doesn’t return exactly to the centre, so your character or camera slowly moves on its own. It is caused by worn potentiometers, dust or a weak centring spring, and it is the most common fault on modern controllers.

Check drift (3 s) records the stick positions for three seconds while you don’t touch them and reports the largest offset from the centre:

• below 0.05: normal sensor noise, no drift;
• 0.05 to 0.15: slight drift that the default dead zone of most games (around 0.1 to 0.15) hides;
• above 0.15: noticeable drift in game. The result tells you the smallest dead zone that would hide it.

The dead zone used here is a scaled radial one: positions inside the ring read zero, and the rest of the travel is stretched back to the full 0 to 1 range, which is how most modern games handle it. Move the Dead zone slider to see what a given setting would hide.

Vibration

Chrome and Edge expose vibration through vibrationActuator for Xbox and PlayStation controllers, and Xbox One/Series pads on Windows may also support Trigger rumble. Firefox and Safari expose little or no vibration support, and the Vibration field then shows Not available. That is a browser limit, not a broken motor.