Does anyone know what is a discrete switch?

[berserkfan]

Googling discrete switches discrete switches didn't give me good info, so I thought I'd ask.

There is a Radioshack computer with what Aer Fixus identified as discrete switches on auction now, auction ending 11 hours, btw.

[kolonelkadat]

im pretty certain he simply means that the switches are, well, switches. as in they are not a 3 layer plastic sheet assembly or foam and foil assembly. in other words each switch is a single thing

[tuxsavvy]

I think if you look at it on a more general sense. Discrete would mean individual in electronic sort of sense. I was talking to a few people the other day comparing the likes of modern desktop computers versus embedded devices like smartphones, tablets, etc. You have all these SoC, PoP which are packing more stuff on a single die (or a chip in a more layman's sense). Then you get discrete ones which a few or only one component sitting in a single die, and are separate from another. That is a CPU would not have just L1/L2/L3 RAM, with embedded devices you get video chip, maybe a radio (for wireless communication) and other things all on one chip.

So basically, I guess discrete switch would be none other than what kolonelkadat describes. In other words individually packed switch.

[tp4tissue]

im pretty certain he simply means that the switches are, well, switches. as in they are not a 3 layer plastic sheet assembly or foam and foil assembly. in other words each switch is a single thing

yea pretty sure they mean "individual switches" vs the membrane.

you could go further with tuxsavvy's  route, if we were talking about electronic signaling..

But this is a keyboard switch..

[damorgue]

It could also be discrete in the sense that it has discrete signal levels, eg on/off. Hall effect, Topre and such switches could be made into separate units but they don't have on/off states in the same sense. That is done in the controller which has to set a level where a value above it is on and below it is off for instance.

I guess that most commonly it refers to separate physical units as the others have described though.

[berserkfan]

OK, so it doesn't refer to a name for a switch type, the way Hall Effect and Alps are names of switch types.

I understand the plain English meaning of it; just wasn't expecting that the poster was using a plain English meaning as opposed to an Engineering Geek name!

 

[fohat.digs]

Now I understand how to articulate my explanations to people who refer to "Model F switches being better than Model M switches" since buckling spring mechanisms are not "discrete switches" by this definition!

A discrete mechanism does not necessarily indicate a discrete switch.

[Aer Fixus]

It's been answered already, but to say it myself, I mean that each switch is individual. I found the image of the bottom of the keyboard PCB before I found the switch itself and saw that each switch had solder points. To my knowledge, this is only something that happens with individual keyswitches. If it were capacitive or rubber dome over PCB, there would be no solder points. If it were a sheet of membrane, there would be no PCB.