deskthority

I thought I'd start a new topic to make my request clearer (I'd close the old one if I could). OK, here we go, this is what we have so far:

→ [wiki]Switch recognition[/wiki]

Covers most of the common switches and a few more.

It takes around 2–3 hours for each diagram (that's what I've been doing all week), so before I continue, I want to get an idea of what everyone makes of it all. A few possible options:

• Replace the whole lot with a single page of photos, like Mousefan's (would require suitable photos with permission for use)
• Alter the template to show photos next to the diagrams
• Show diagrams, or diagrams+images, on a single page (like Mousefan's)
• Switch to 175 px fixed height, variable width diagrams for better alignment and to match up with 4:3 aspect images (will take time as they're carefully adjusted to fit the pixel grid nicely)
• Have all diagrams be to a mutual scale (requires measurements; will affect page layout)
• Remove the colour boxes for any switch with only one colour

Etc.

Obviously there's a long way to go yet. Once I'm back at work, you may only get a couple of diagrams per week, but it may take that long to round up photos or to get permission to use those from people outside Deskthority.

For your protection, I won't enter into this debate at all — you can discuss amongst yourselves and I won't say anything.

Ultimately, we do need something here of some kind, which is why I created this set of guide pages. I will let you all choose what you think Deskthority should have for identifying switches. For now, I won't work on this any further until the outcome of this discussion.

Great work man!

Woah....those look AWESOME!

Really, great work!

Of all your bullet points, I would like to see an actual photo of the switch next to the diagram. The photo should be taken from an angle, as opposed to a top-down view, in order to get a better impression of the dimensions.

I would love to have an overview poster with the flowchart that is hiding behind those links.

Real nice!

Diagrams are unworkable.

I've switched two pages over to photographs today, and I will do more of them later:

[wiki]Alps mount recognition[/wiki]
[wiki]Other mount recognition[/wiki]

The latter now has more material. The former no longer lists several Alps clones, which will reappear at some point. Some diagrams will remain where I don't have a suitable photograph. Most NMB Hi-Tek images aren't added yet — I just grabbed a couple for now.

My preference for these images is in-situ photographs, cropped to show a single switch.

Daniel, what’s the best way to get images to you for inclusion in the wiki (e.g. images of switches in-situ like the ones you want here)? I’d just as soon take a bunch of pictures and just dump them on you, instead of trying to worry about what you want the wiki image pages to say, which images are most relevant to which wiki pages, etc.

By the way, do you know what this is?

Also, this seems to be a different type of Alps dome-with-slider:



From http://deskthority.net/photos-videos-f8 ... t7400.html

jacobolus wrote:By the way, do you know what this is?

I've never seen that before. I assume there's no writing on the top of the switch? I can't quite tell.

jacobolus wrote:Also, this seems to be a different type of Alps dome-with-slider…

Why am I not surprised? :) Alps never tired of variety.

jacobolus wrote:Daniel, what’s the best way to get images to you for inclusion in the wiki (e.g. images of switches in-situ like the ones you want here)? I’d just as soon take a bunch of pictures and just dump them on you, instead of trying to worry about what you want the wiki image pages to say, which images are most relevant to which wiki pages, etc.

[/quote]

One of my reasons for opting for diagrams originally was for visual consistency. With photographs, one has to accept that the recognition images will never be cropped the same way, never taken from the same angle, etc. Basically they just need to be shot from a reasonable angle, cropped tightly, clean and well lit, so that you can recognise the switch easily at a glance. I'm naming them "$SWITCH -- recognition.jpg" to help keep them separate from other image usage, to avoid them being replaced with a photo that is no longer suitable for the purpose.

If you want a wiki PA, you will need to seek a recruitment company who specialises in wiki PAs … It's me who needs minions, rather than me volunteering to be someone else's minion ;-)

The question of what illustrations should go where and why is a whole other topic, and while it's reasonably obvious, I'll leave someone else to start a flame war over that one.

Well, I can take pictures of a lot of these switches all at once, using the same lighting, angles, white balance, etc., which will make them all consistent. I’m happy to contribute pictures, but I don’t know exactly what you want to do with them, so I’d just as soon leave that part to you.

Daniel Beardsmore wrote:Diagrams are unworkable.

I liked your diagrams. What was the problem? Too limited for conveying the subtle differences between the members of the Alps vortex? Mmh, maybe that's the case, and diagrams are more suited for displaying the general shapes of switches. Such as on the [wiki]Switch recognition[/wiki] page.

Kurk wrote:

Daniel Beardsmore wrote:Diagrams are unworkable.

I liked your diagrams. What was the problem?

I don't own every switch on the planet, and while I can work from photographs, the perspective in the photo distorts the comparative sizes of the parts; I really need measurements to work from, and no-one's ever answered my requests for them. Also, all too often, the only photos I have access to are too dark or too fuzzy, and taking good switch photos is extremely hard, as they're usually black and really hard to get light from the flash into.

A combination of inadequate illumination and focus, together with perspective distortion, means that the diagrams on the [wiki]Cherry M8[/wiki] page are the best I could do. Most details are omitted as I couldn't figure out what I was looking at, and I couldn't reconcile all the perspective errors, especially when the only good images I found weren't taken top-down.

The diagrams take up a lot of time, and you have to consider just how many switches there are, and more are being found all the time — new discoveries include more Clare-Pendar switches (of which there are a lot), Micro Switch magnetic reed, jacobolus's weird Alps-type switch, Printec DS old and new, Gaote's official Cherry MX clones, the ones alleged to be theirs, etc. Realistically, drawing diagrams of them isn't sensible.

It was a nice idea, but horribly impractical. I also feel that photographs are more … not "honest", but … more … real, if you like. It's nicer to be able to match a switch to a photo than to a diagram. This is especially true if the diagrams are all wrong because I'm making it all up because the photos suck. The SMK ones were a nightmare because it was just simply impossible to figure them out from photos. Most of the diagrams are in fact wrong to some extent and are long overdue corrections where I've obtained the switch and could now measure them properly. The SMK Alps-mount diagrams are still there as I couldn't find a decent photo of either. The Alps ones are wrong for sure — I've redrawn them for the Alps SKCL/SKCM page based on measurements and Alps datasheet diagrams, but not yet updated the (now removed) recognition diagrams.

jacobolus wrote:Well, I can take pictures of a lot of these switches all at once, using the same lighting, angles, white balance, etc., which will make them all consistent.

You can make them consistent with your own images (though keeping the angle consistent is extremely hard) but not consistent with anyone else's unless you wanted to shoot every single switch ever made. Nothing that anyone can do. So long as the photos are clean, tidy, well lit, it won't matter too much — I think my bad reaction to photographic recognition pages was in part down to the poor lighting, focus and framing, rather than the concept itself.

jacobolus wrote:I’m happy to contribute pictures, but I don’t know exactly what you want to do with them, so I’d just as soon leave that part to you. :-)

You see the pages with switch recognition pictures on? They go on those.

Daniel Beardsmore wrote:You can make them consistent with your own images (though keeping the angle consistent is extremely hard) but not consistent with anyone else's unless you wanted to shoot every single switch ever made. Nothing that anyone can do.

All you need is a couple days in HaaTa’s apartment and a camera to handle that one. :-p

jacobolus wrote: All you need is a couple days in HaaTa’s apartment and a camera to handle that one. :-p

Only a couple?

A single keyboard can take a good hour to smarten up and have its pictures taken properly. At that rate, you'd need at least a full year in HaaTa's stash.

Muirium wrote:A single keyboard can take a good hour to smarten up and have its pictures taken properly. At that rate, you'd need at least a full year in HaaTa's stash.

Indeed, each switch I photograph can take hours, depending on what mood the camera is in, and the switch's intricacy. Keyboards likewise. Obviously for the sake of switch recognition, I'd only need to clean around one switch.

Besides, HaaTa only deals in a specific subset of keyboards. You've already forgotten about niubio's stash, which is a whole other subset of keyboards:

http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=553 ... msg1256903

Then you have people like MouseFan and 002 with large collections of Japanese products, and alps.tw with all manner of odd switches.

There are a LOT of switches out there. Far too many to draw diagrams of unless that was all I wanted to do, but when I do manage to scrape up some will/motivation/mojo, I've still got a huge backlog of work and it doesn't involve uploading images for forum members, nor will it ever.

I've fiddled with a few more pages, with some extra switches listed:

[wiki]Generic cross mount recognition[/wiki]
[wiki]Inverse cross mount recognition[/wiki]
[wiki]Cherry MX mount recognition[/wiki] (non-Cherry)

Plus I've added Topre here:

[wiki]Other mount recognition[/wiki]

The next problem is that I shoot 4:3, some people shoot in some other size, and a lot of people crop images without concern about aspect ratio. I don't really care what the aspect ratio is so long as it's consistent across all the images! I'll probably recrop the Printec DS and Marquardt images etc to 4:3 to match the other pictures.

Okay, I’ll try to take some 4x3 images of switches tomorrow when the light gets back, if I’m at home. I can do most of the complicated Alps switches; skinny, normal, and locking pcb-mount oval-slider Alps switches; the tactile type of those pcb-mount "low profile" Alps switches; SMK alps-mount white, blue, and lock varieties; Futaba clicky in white, cyan, gray, and lock varieties; Omron B3G-S in white and orange; Matias tactile and clicky; Cherry MX red, clear, blue, brown, and black.

If you had to pick, what camera angle would you prefer?

Photographing the tops of these will only take a few minutes each; these switch identification pictures are pretty simple, don’t need any fancy lighting (just blue sky shining through a window), don’t need any fancy post-processing, don’t have to be at an inordinately high resolution, etc. I’ll break out the tripod and semi-macro (1:2) lens, but I don’t think that’s actually necessary.

I can also try to take some measurements with a caliper. Anything in particular you want measured?

I don't personally need any measurements. It sounds like you won't have any to add to [wiki]Cross mount clearinghouse[/wiki] either, although some slider dimensions would be interesting. There are locking corned beef tin switches too? I didn't realise that. I've not added the skinny version to the wiki as I've not found a name for them yet: the "oval slider" name isn't valid as it doesn't cover the skinny ones, but I couldn't think of a sufficiently short and snappy name that would cover both types. Also the Futaba "clicky" switches have linear versions … there's a long waiting list of switches in need of new names.

Angle is a good question — I tend to go for diagonal (low angle from the front-left) simple because it reduces the effects of the flash. I've been managing to get low angle front shots of the Alps switches in my collection, which I prefer for the variants table images. For switch recognition I doubt it matters — whichever is easiest. They'll all be different from different people — the one I took of the [wiki]alps.tw Type OA2[/wiki] was at an angle where the numbering was visible, in addition to keeping the rest of the image lit/focused correctly etc.

All pages are now converted to photographs, and I've added a few more switches that weren't listed (though I still need to sort out all the Alps clones).

I've cross-posted all the images of my own Cherry MX switches from the [wiki]Cherry MX[/wiki] page.

At some point I need to bring up every single switch listed on the wiki and ensure that it's been added to one of the recognition pages, even if just as a placeholder image.

Awesome work! Hmm, I'm going to go through my flickr pages and see what's not there and add pics for each switch.
Some of these switches don't have names so I'll just leave that blank for now...

The fun one will be the Mitsumis …

http://deskthority.net/wiki/File:Apple_ ... itches.jpg

What are those? They're not "Alps clones", yet they're also not the "mechanical" type (either the miniature ones, or the bigger ones that are the same inside). They're probably the same inside as the "Alps clone" (Alps mount) ones, but I don't know for certain. I think I may have seen a photo of the insides somewhere.

Switches without names can be assigned temporary names:

http://deskthority.net/wiki/Category:Unknown_switches

I had to create temporary designations for some SMK/SMK clone switches (and with the Maxi and NEC problem, we can't tell what is a clone and what isn't) that have only an unclear monogram for the branding.

I am categorising such switches thus:

[[Category:Designations]]
[[Category:Unknown switches]]
[[Category:List of all keyboard switches]]

While I'm looking through my keyboards...how should I label the typewriter-like mounts?


Colimation

VEB Schaltgerätewerk Auerbach D2770


Haven't taken these keycaps off yet (a bit afraid I might break the keycap).
Smith-Corona Ultrasonic I Plus

Teletype Model 28 KSR Keyboard

Beam Spring also falls under this category (but it's pretty clear what it is from a keycap pull).

The Smith-Corona in particular shows nothing with a keycap pull...and is actually misleading (it's an acoustic sense mechanism and not selectric-like at all).

It gets tricky, I know. I didn't realise that, despite the weird slider shape, the keycap of a Fujitsu Leaf Spring switch is just a perfectly square hole, or so it seems from the photo I saw (and again, I'm working from an unclear photo). However, I'm going to classify them as other, in part because people are more likely to want to compare slider shapes than they are keycaps, and the keycap shape is not in any way obvious from the shape of the slider.

That first photo is effectively "bar" mount, which is already on the Other page anyway. Not many of those around.

Possibly over time, it will make sense to split the Other page up somehow.

I've added a couple more from my own limited collection: a fresh photo of NMB dome with slider (better lit and taken from a front-on viewpoint) and a fresh one of Mitsumi tactile hybrid, again from a front-on viewpoint.

Obviously there's a very long way to go, but free from the burden of diagrams, there are now far more switches covered than there were before, so that is a big plus. Maybe tonight I'll look into adding all the remaining switches as placeholder images, as a reminder of what needs photographs, and so that people are aware that, if what they seek doesn't match the pictures, there are indeed other options to explore.

Funny thing is, I've made a spreadsheet to track my progress, and I've got switches on the recognition page that aren't even in List of all keyboard switches (which is what I'm using). Oops!

Been meaning to add more, just got my piano so that's been sucking up my time
Soon, I'll get back into keyboard documentation again.

Having categorised a number of switches that weren't showing up, Category:List of all keyboard switches has now hit the page limit (200) and extends onto a second page.

I don't know how many switches are still missing from the wiki outright, but I suspect it's quite a lot.

HaaTa: is this beige switch a latching switch?

https://plus.google.com/photos/11384566 ... 0166847954

I can't tell from the photo.

If that's got the same beautifully turned brass follower as the SMK lock, that would suggest that it's made by the same factory.

Sorry, wasn't subscribed to the thread

I haven't looked at the keyboards side by side in a while, but it memory serves me correct, I believe all three are the same colour.

Kaypro 1, SMK
https://plus.google.com/photos/11384566 ... 5823397356

TTX Keyboard? (I still don't know where this is from), SMK
https://plus.google.com/photos/11384566 ... 5823397356

Geomet 200, Maxi
https://plus.google.com/photos/11384566 ... 5823397356

I don't think any of those switches are locking (couldn't find any noticeable differences other than the colours).