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.
