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?
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.
Industrial limit switches have been used to sense position of things since forever, and likely keyboard switches evolved from one of their variants.
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).
