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Comment by dotnet00 | Hacker News Reader

Title made me think these would be keyboard switches in the same style as the "Unklicky" bed-leveling probes on 3d printers, where two magnets are used as a spring + as electrical contacts to complete a circuit.

I figure that making these hall effect based switches is more tedious due to the calibration needed. As for applications though, if the keypress could be made into an analog output, the keys could act similarly to shoulder buttons on game controllers or allow WASD/arrow keys to act similarly to a joystick.

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>As for applications though, if the keypress could be made into an analog output, the keys could act similarly to shoulder buttons on game controllers or allow WASD/arrow keys to act similarly to a joystick.

This isn't an "if" they are used exactly for that purpose already. What they can also do is change the length you need to press down to register an input, so you have a keyboard with variable sensitivity.

The wooting keyboards have been able to do this for years.

i had the same thought re: analog input but the more I think about it, the less the idea makes sense.

take the Xbox controller triggers, those have a ton of travel. I don't know the exact amount but I wouldn't be surprised if it was multiple cm. a keyboard switch has single digit mm of travel, usually sub-5mm iirc.

I have a hard time seeing how that could be enough travel to allow precise enough control even in forgiving games like GTA.

they certainly are neat switches though. i'd like to try them out sometime.

The Steam Deck I have laying next to me seems to have around 6-7mm of travel on the shoulder triggers. Looks like these can do 4mm, so yeah I suppose there would be about half the precision.

The tips of the trigger are moving at most 1cm. A key press travel is on the same order magnitude as the trigger. The larger challenge is you can achieve high precision and repeatability on the triggers because of your fixed point of references (how you hold the controller). This is much more challenging to achieve on a keyboard, but also not impossible. We can see analogous situations with playing keyboard instruments.

The same thought about keyboard instruments will probably point to analog computer keyboards getting the most of the analog input through velocity control as opposed to absolute position control. Ie, striking a key quickly vs slowly causing different behavior.

I think the precision wouldn't compare favorably to a controller, but not only because of less travel, but also because of the lack of a stable and consistent grip that you can have with a controller.

Analog keyboards are already a thing. The Razer Huntsman for example. The PS2 (and 3) had analog face buttons despite having pretty shit travel (far far less than most mech boards). For the handful of games that put serious effort into using it, they sort of worked. I don't think it would be super great for controlling speed of movement but it might be pretty good for double actions mapped to the same key like Metal Gear Solid 2 did back on the PS2. Playing modern versions without it feels a bit less natural.

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