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Stability of plate mounted switches

Posted: 19 Nov 2012, 17:00
by 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?

Posted: 19 Nov 2012, 17:31
by 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.

Posted: 19 Nov 2012, 17:46
by 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.

Posted: 19 Nov 2012, 17:53
by fossala
The maltron basically uses just a plate and wires.

Posted: 19 Nov 2012, 18:02
by Findecanor
Inside the Maltron, each switch is glued to the key well.

Posted: 19 Nov 2012, 18:06
by fossala
No its not.

Posted: 19 Nov 2012, 22:41
by 7bit
hypre wrote: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.

:-)

Posted: 21 Nov 2012, 11:55
by hypre
Thanks everyone! I'll probably pick up a Hyper (Micro) PCB, even if a matrix layout appeals more to me.

Posted: 23 Nov 2012, 09:26
by Findecanor
fossala wrote: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.