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Momentary toggle switch

A project log for Altair 8800 front panel Ardiuno shield

A very small fully-functional interface for an Arduino Due emulating an Altair 8800

justin-davisJustin Davis 02/24/2017 at 17:480 Comments

One thing I had to figure out early on was how to do the switches. The switches need to be very small to fit. There are two types of switches - momentary and non-momentary. The non-momentary switches stay where they are when you switch them. These were easy to find - I just used surface-mount DIP switches. They come in sets of 8 which is perfect. The momentary switches were much more difficult to find. They need to be Mom-off-mom style, so they need to return to center after pressing, and they needed to be moved in two directions. This means probably two springs inside them which makes them large. But I found these switches:

These are Panasonic ESE-24SV3 limit switches. Unfortunately they are through-hole only, but they are the right size. I ordered some to make sure they were return to center and they are. I think I got very lucky in finding these. I'll have to see how well they work in the system. The only other issue is the limit switches are a much higher profile than the DIP switches, so I hope there won't be a problem moving the DIP switches and bump the limit switches.

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