I was wondering if there’s any good use-case for mechanical switches outside the keyboard market? And if so, where else can they be used?
There’s a whole linage of arcade game button design, but you occasionally see keyboard switches show up in custom fighting game sticks.
Mice and trackballs often borrow from the whole universe of buttons to make their sculpted formfactors work. I feel like I’ve seen one or two with mechanical keyboard switches in them.
Like rockSlayer mentioned, they just bridge a physical connection between two pins and can technically be used anywhere a typical button could be. Keyboard switches are so optimized for their large square footprint and particular travel distance that they’re usually not the best fit for random industrial needs. You could make an elevator control panel out of key switches, but there’s probably a cheaper, more well suited button you could use instead.
Sometimes it’s kind of fun to scroll through the McMaster-Carr catalog, which has parts for those industrial needs. Their buttons and switches are here. I’m pretty sure the basic mechanism on those is the same as a keyboard switch, just larger.
Some of those panel-mount switches look almost exactly like what’s in my arcade stick, and are probably intended for things like elevator buttons.
*edit: That link is being weird and sometimes not loading. Try searching for “switches” in their search box, then clicking “manual switches” to see what I was trying to link to.
As the name implies, it’s just a switch that uses mechanical actuation to register a press. Therefore, they could theoretically be put anywhere you need a button or switch
I use mechanical switches when I’m making a panel or something on a device that I don’t want to break after getting pressed a bunch. Membrane switches just break a lot, and for industrial applications (ie gloves, metallic dust, operating by touch) capacitive panels can be unreliable.
Thank you for sharing your personal example. What I was also wondering about is, since you’re using a panel that requires something like a momentary switch, why the need for mechanical switches? Understandable, that in a way, it is also a type of momentary switch, but does the actuation force and travel distance hinder, or benefit you from what you actually wanted to use these switches for?
The tactile response is what’s useful, so for people using the panel with gloves, say I want a directional control for navigating a menu I can just throw down some arrow keys and have a lot of options for keycaps if I don’t need it sealed. I try to make things relatively easy to repair so using parts which are commonly available is a plus.
My friend had a guitar pedal with an alps switch as the pedal switch. I didn’t know anything about mkb back then, so I didn’t appreciate it, but he did tell me that it was the same switch as the ones inside his dad’s kb. I now know that it was alps.
I’ve never taken one apart to investigate, but I think Grandstream’s VoIP phones use something clicky like a Cherry blue switch as the hook switch (where you hang up the receiver).
Industrial limit switches have been used to sense position of things since forever, and likely keyboard switches evolved from one of their variants.
Anything that needs buttons, control pads, end stops, etc.
