Cortron foam and foil

[Engicoder]

Yet another foam and foil switch (YAFF) This fooled me a bit. I was expecting the low profile magnetic valve switches as the caps looked identical, but it seems Cortron switched to foam and foil at some point. These are from 2009.
Pictures follow: (Note: The thin plastic some sort of dust/spill barrier. )


Switch top view - mount similar to low profile magnetic valve switches.


Switch top view - depressed. Spring is quite heavy ~80-100g


Switch bottom view - Note circular LED cutout in plate at left corner of switch


Switch bottom view - depressed


Close up of sense pads on PCB include lock LED







Wikification and more photos forthcoming...

[Wingklip]

Is it nkro or contact based sensing?

[seebart]

Very nice find Engicoder, really good pictures too. This is the type of post that motivates me to even keep coming back to DT at all.

[Parak]

I've had a few of these lying around for a while now - they also come in backlight flavor where those center pads hold an LED that shines directly through a hole in the switch stem.

Horrible to type on by the way, but key feel is not exactly the ultimate purpose of these boards.

[XMIT]

Parak, you've got a bunch of interesting boards too. Do you have an online gallery that catalogs all of them or something like this?

One goal for this year is to get more folks with substantial collections to share them online. Great finds tucked away in a box in a corner do no one any good!

[Chyros]

Very interesting, nice pictures too! Do you have a picture of the whole board, with caps on and all? I'm kinda curious what the board itself looks like .

So, they used a contamination shield of some sorts. And F&F. I know Cortron stepped away from their ITW switches at some point, but last I looked on their website they specified they still used "magnetic" switches IIRC. This being from 2009 it might be one of the last F&F designs.

Funny is that while the top housings and cap pads are completely different, the switch housings and sliders look almost identical to KT F&F from below xD .

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Foam and foil in 2009? Wow.

I did have a contact at Cortron (who was responsible for the totally wrong information about the Hi-Tek/Stackpole relationship, that fortunately D'Milo later corrected) and they had plans to post a gallery of their products, but that plan seems to have gone south and he's gone dead. Too bad, as it would be interesting to get some specs on this product, as well as the formal product names for the switches and keyboards.

I also want to know the specifics of ITW magnetic valve, including how Devlin came to own the tooling.

[Engicoder]

Is it nkro or contact based sensing?

I believe its capacitive. The bottom side of the pcb is similar to other capacitive f&f boards. Furthermore the board IC's include a 4 to 16 decoder, 8 channel multiplexer/demultiplexer and a dual differential comparator. All that sounds very much like a dc pulse sensing implementation.

[Engicoder]

I've had a few of these lying around for a while now - they also come in backlight flavor where those center pads hold an LED that shines directly through a hole in the switch stem.

Horrible to type on by the way, but key feel is not exactly the ultimate purpose of these boards.

I think you can see the pads/holes for the center LED on the pcb of this keyboard.
Agreed on the typing feel. The springs are way to stiff, but there isn't that mushy feel most foam and foil boards have.

[Engicoder]

Here is a view of the complete keyboard. I will upload the rest of the images later today.
Its a pretty nice reduced layout. The pad on the right is an analog joystick. with three buttons.