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#Electronics fedi, what make and model are these tactile switches? They don't match anything I'm seeing when searching for "slim round smd tactile" and the like - everything has too big a base and often the wrong colour. Is it possible they've just rolled their own mechanism to make it super tiny? They snap satisfyingly in and out but take a surprising amount of force.
These are in a weirdo gamepad I want to write about this week and would like to know everything there is to know about them.
The gamepad in question was made in China and they absolutely spared every expense possible. It has a slot in it to store a USB dongle but they never made a wireless version of it. There are other buttons that are completely ignored by the manual and appear to do nothing at all but might have done something if they'd implemented more features. So I would not be terribly surprised to learn these are offcuts from some random manufacturing process stickytaped onto a cheap PCB.
One other observation - it's possible to press the button and make the thing buckle and make the clicky noise, but still not actually make electrical contact - it's easy to get a false-positive out of pressing one of these buttons. That I think lends credence to the possibility of these being some weird DIY thing, like it's possible to buckle the metal but not press hard enough to make it bridge contacts underneath.
@timixretroplays wait… these may not actually be tac buttons at all. They might be a dish-shaped piece of spring steel and the 5-point indent on the top makes contact to a bare pad underneath.
Go on, de-solder one!
@jpm "solder" is a very strong word for what's happening in here. You're exactly right, it's just a cup of spring steel basically stickytaped over a concentric pair of contact rings.
I did think the cups were rather poorly centred on the rings and assumed that was a QA/assembly accuracy issue, but I suspect it might actually be necessary for them to be in the right place to actually bridge the contact - otherwise they'd invert directly over the middle one and never touch both at once!
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