Does switch side matter?

[Narann]

Hi all and happy new year!

I just realize something. It doesn't seems to be anything said about the side of the switch.

Most PCB with LED holes imply the switch LED pins are on the top. But on some keyboards not using any LED, looks like it's common to put the LED placement of the switch on the bottom.

Good example here: https://www.pcgamer.com/best-mechanical-switches-for-gaming/

I would say it shouldn't change anything, but I have tested and I have the impression it actually change the tactility of "tactile" switches a little.

Am I the only one? Is there some science about this or shouldn't you care?

Thanks in advance! 

EDIT: The original GH60 PCB had LED holes at the bottom while GH60 SATAN (and cheap Chinese keyboards) have LED holes on the top.

[BlindAssassin111]

This is commonly referred to as north and south facing LEDs(north being top and south being bottom). The issue that some have noticed, at least from my reading, is that north facing has issues with GMK/Cherry cap travel, meaning switches can't bottom out fully, on the smaller profile caps like row 3.

As for tactility, it wouldn't have a noticeable effect unless you constantly hit on saw the bottom of a cap and when you rotate the tactile bumps are on the opposite side of the switch now so it would behave slightly(and I mean very, very slightly) differetly, but not to the point you can say they are different levels of tactility(unless of course the switch in question has massive amounts of wobble in the stem).

[merlin64]

I personally didn't notice a difference until I read about it.

Granted, at the time I had o-rings, so that probably helped hide it from me.

Regardless, I now have it stuck in my mentality that North Facing is bad and South Facing is good.

[Tactile]

Actually the real GH60 has a mix of most this way and a few that way. I can't tell any difference on the one I built.

http://blog.komar.be/gh60-rev-c-plain-edition-is-out/

[Findecanor]

I don't know... I can feel a a difference if I tell myself there is a difference, but if I tell myself that there is no difference then I can't feel any difference.

The switches were designed together with Cherry keycaps to have the LED facing south, so that is the "right" way.
BTW, it is also the only way that works with silencing clips (unless you cut them).

[Tactile]

And, while we're discussing switch rotation there's this info about mounting switches sideways:

Code: [Select]

One of the most annoying problems of the previous version of the PCB was the necessity to mount some of the switches rotated 90 degrees.
As unimportant as it could seem, it is an actual problem. During a discussion on geekhack someone brought to my attention the fact that the Cherry MX
switch stems are not perfectly "cross-shaped", as I had previously thought. And this caused keycaps to mount very tightly on the stem making it very
hard to remove the keycap and introducing a potential risk of breaking the keycap stem.
That's from the web page here.

[Narann]

Thanks peoples ! Looks like there is no consensus on what is the perfect way as it highly depend on the context.

[Tactile]

There's also the case of some keycaps sometimes hitting the switch housing when the switches are mounted with the LED cutout on the side away from the spacebar.

[Kavik]

My understanding is that north facing switches are placed as such so that the LEDs shine through keycaps with translucent legends since the legends are typically situated more towards the top of the keycap.

A good example of this is the numpad on my Quickfire TK. The arrow keys have south facing LEDs while the rest of the switches have north facing LEDs. You can see that the 2, 0, 00, and . are not well illuminated, but the arrows are. On the other keys, the numerals are well illuminated, but the navigation cluster sublegends are not. In the photo, they don't look too bad, but in person, they are noticeably dimmer.

I'd say go with south facing if you aren't going to use keycaps with translucent legends (shine-through) so that you can use GMK keycaps. As for tactility differences, I have no idea.

[a user]

I personally didn't notice a difference until I read about it.

Granted, at the time I had o-rings, so that probably helped hide it from me.

Regardless, I now have it stuck in my mentality that North Facing is bad and South Facing is good.

Actually on the HS60 v3 the diference is like day and night. You have nearly no light through your keycap letters as they are usually on the top end of the keycap but the led is far on the bottom side.

The esc and 1 key switches are positioned viceversa and you can see a big difference.

This is totally annoying as the letters barely get any light if you have not your brightness at max or nearly. But then the light around the keys is 100 times brighter.

My first custom pcb and i learned now: NEVER EVER i will get a board with leds on the bottom side.

[Narann]

You have nearly no light through your keycap letters as they are usually on the top end of the keycap

That's a pretty good point!

[alphabirth]

Depending on the keycap profile and the size of LEDs used, there may be some interference based on whether you go with north-facing or south-facing orientation.  There was a very thorough analysis of this that someone did a little while ago: https://imgur.com/gallery/s1MeXJ8

[Maledicted]

Depending on the keycap profile and the size of LEDs used, there may be some interference based on whether you go with north-facing or south-facing orientation.  There was a very thorough analysis of this that someone did a little while ago: https://imgur.com/gallery/s1MeXJ8

Interesting results. I'm surprised that's posted on IMGUR, and not somewhere like here where it might get more focused exposure. That makes NovelKey's decision to make their box switches SMD-only seem pretty practical.