I have created a small webapp that does exactly this: http://www.switchesdb.com/
It allows you to search through switches measured by HaaTa and ThereminGoat, then view their force curves and optionally overlay multiple within a single graph.
- Screenshot 2023-01-04 at 15.19.59.png (524.01 KiB) Viewed 11537 times
You may wonder why I called it "switches database." There are already a dozen online databases for keyboard switches and I don't intend to manually curate and maintain facts/stats like these do. I wish to provide a greater focus on *data science* and collate measurements from multiple sources and use this data to extrapolate more information on the switches. HaaTa has already done this by calculating and including *total force* (work) in his graphs, and I think he had ambitions for more (ThereminGoat has recently announced similar aspirations). I share these ambitions and think there lies lots of potential in curve analysis, and using the results as a basis for discovering new switches and comparing existing ones.
Let's say you like a switch, but you wish it had less preload and more tactile drop-off. Imagine being able to look up these values for your switch, and then filter for your target values and quickly see which switches match, instead of spending hours upon hours searching the internet for subjective comments which later turn out to be incorrect.
Well that was a foray into what I hope to come. Right now the webapp is just a more efficient interface to the force curves already available. If you have suggestions for what kind of additional data we can extract from the measurements, and particularly if you have the maths (numpy is even better) to calculate it (reliably for measurements of nearly a thousand switches) - and likewise, any suggestions to improve the current functionality of the webapp - please let me know!
