Stability of plate mounted switches

[hypre]

Hello DT!

I'm making a custom board and can't find out if plate mounted switches require a pcb under them for stability.

Or are they stable enough with just the plate to be soldered directly to wires and fed to a Teensy 3.0?

[The_Ed]

They may come out of the plate without a PCB as they come out pretty easy with a little push. Also, you can re-use some of the PCB traces to reduce your wiring if you're smart about it.

[IvanIvanovich]

pcb helps with stability, but most important is that tie down surface. I suppose if the plate was a very tight fit, it could be ok. Obviously you wouldn't want the switches to fall out if you turned it over.

[fossala]

The maltron basically uses just a plate and wires.

[Findecanor]

Inside the Maltron, each switch is glued to the key well.

[fossala]

No its not.

[7bit]

I'm making a custom board and can't find out if plate mounted switches require a pcb under them for stability.

It depends on the mount plate. The Phantom plates are quite OK, but you should use some hot glue or something similar to really fix them, because it is quite easy to push them out of the mount plate again (I've inserted them the wrong way round and had no problem to push them out again).

Just wait until the Hyper keyboard group buy starts and buy a proper PCB.

[hypre]

Thanks everyone! I'll probably pick up a Hyper (Micro) PCB, even if a matrix layout appeals more to me.

[Findecanor]

No its not.

I was sure that I had seen a picture of one that had glue. I'll see if I can find it again.