Back in my day, if you wanted to make a mechanical keyboard, you had to solder in expensive Cherry MX switches onto your PCB – and woe to the person who decided they wanted to change their linear keys instead of clicky ones! Bah humbug, kids these days have no idea, what with their fancy Kailh Switch Sockets – they know nothing of suffering!
With these sockets, mechanical keys can snap right in, and are easily replaceable with no soldering at all. It’s almost too easy!
These sockets fit MX and MX-compatible switches – Cherry, Kailh, Gateron, etc! We use these in our NeoKey boards, the Socket Breakout and the FeatherWing. We thought we’d offer these in a pack of twenty for folks who want to prototype their own mechanical keypad projects.
Note that you’ll still need some mechanical support for snapped-in switches, some hot glue or a dab of epoxy can keep the switch from coming out during use.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
