Oh so it's handled on the pcb. I am curious because I watched a few video on youtube about hall effect sensors and in some of them there's an included part that reacts to the high/low property of the sensor and converts the high/low to on/off (if I understood right). But on another video, the guy mentions that this is irrelevant if plugged in a controller because the controller can decide to do whatever he wants with the signal.
I am pretty new to electronics but by knowing that, I assume that the controller can detect the voltage that comes back and then a programmer could decide to do whatever he wants with the signal. I didn't know such a thing but if it's true that would make it much easier to make a controller work for Hall Effect. All you would need to do is to wire all the switches with a traditional row/columns setup with diodes and scan the current column by column and then all the controller would need to do compared to a normal mech keyboard would be to convert the high/low value to on/off and pass the signal to the standard code.
I really need to start reading about these teensies lol!
yeah, i gave a talk on them at keycon last summer but it was pretty dry. one of these days, i'll write up a thing on them but not right now.
to get an idea of how it works and how it debounces, look up the drawings at the end of this article
http://deskthority.net/wiki/Honeywell_Hall_Effect and especially the hallbook i found
http://sensing.honeywell.com/index.php?ci_id=47847now the hallbook is about hall sensors in general but the beginning is all theory that explains it well, and the last 80 or so pages are applications (non kb related for the most part.)
the debounce is handled by a schmitt trigger. basically there's the hall element, the "balance" transistors (that amplify the difference), and the schmitt trigger that adds hysterisis and debounce, then the output pins.
so it's almost all handled by the hall sensor itself, leaving the controller to do the really easy task of determining if there's 5v or not there. this was a big deal in 1968 when processing things like debounce was a lot harder than it is today.
if you're interested in it, i'd love to chat sometime. i really like these hall switches and i want to get these kbs working!
