This doesn’t always happen, but over the years, we’ve noticed that once we launch a project, many very similar builds often appear on our prompt line soon. Of course, these are not plagiarists; For some competitive manufacturers, there is not enough time to develop their own versions. No, most of the time others are working on a very similar project in isolation, and now they realize for the first time that they are not alone.
Due to this phenomenon, we are pleased to report that another 3D printing maglev switch has been exposed. The concept developed by famichu is obviously different from what we have seen before, which makes the whole thing more impressive to some extent. It is one thing for multiple hackers to develop similar projects independently, because the ultimate goal often determines the nature of the design itself. But here, we see that a project adopts the same core concept and runs in different directions.
So, what makes the magnetic levitation switch MX and [riskable] recently released void_ Is the switch different? In a word, practice. It seems that [famichu] wants to create a magnetic switch, which operates in roughly the same way as the traditional cherry MX switch_ The switch represents a re imagination of how the keyboard switch should work completely. For example, instead of placing all Hall effect sensors on the main PCB so that each individual switch does not need to be electrically connected, each maglev switch MX is fixed together and must be connected together to form a matrix.
Internally, [famichu] proposed a unique layout. Allegro a1304 linear Hall effect sensor is actually placed between two opposite magnets, which represent traditional springs. When the key is pressed, the sensor will pick up the surrounding changing magnetic flux environment, but interestingly, the schematic diagram of the keyboard PCB seems to indicate that the microcontroller does not read the sensor directly. Instead, their outputs are used to trigger MOSFETs on each row of the matrix.
In this design, each switch has its own Hall sensor.
In terms of printing, the components of magnetic levitation switch MX are better than void_ There are few switches, and [famichu] recommends printing on msla machine. FDM and print void_ This greatly speeds up the printing time compared to the switch, because filling the entire build volume of the printer at each run time does not cause a loss of time. As for customization, fusion 360 design documents have been included outside the standard STL / 3mf model. But as far as our money is concerned, there is nothing better than using the customization function of openscad in such a project.
The biggest gain here is that there is obviously more than one way to make an open source, 3D printing, magnetic MX style switch. We are glad to see that these two projects have been further developed, especially because a bird told us that [riskable] has carefully studied this design and developed void based on it_ The experience of switching has conveyed some notes to [famichu]. With the cooperation of these two magnetic experts, the future of customized input devices does look very bright.