 The great search run to buy did you key and a fruit every single week lady is a power of engineering help you Yes, you find the parts you need on did you key comm? They did what is a great search of the week this week. Okay, so this week I saw this really cool thread by this person rumor And they got a snap Tron design guide and you know, they posted this really neat video So there's a demo of this series from snap Tron. You can see they are Snapdome switches, but they have LED back lights in them, which is like very very neat so You know the first place I saw snap down switches was the pocket chip which had if I zoom in here It had dozens and dozens like maybe, you know half half a like sorry like 500 or 600 that's a 50 or 60 100 50 or 60 a couple dozen Snapdome switches that were laminated into a piece of plastic and then Place on top of the PCB and you know, this is a much less expensive way of manufacturing And yes a much lower height like you don't have the mechanics of like, you know This switch with pads and then above it, you know an actuator Your your your fingers the actuator and then of course you can put an overlay like a vinyl overlay that has legend on it And you know, you can use this for That you use that to label the buttons So like, you know, I have these low cost remote controls and I had it I was a kid at a calculator that had these little pocket calculator with dome switches so Inexpensive easy way to add a lot of buttons and I think you know, this was a perfect example of of Dome switches so snap Tron I guess their whole thing is they make dome switches because this is like a pretty sweet hero image Demonstrating all of their products. So like really big ones teeny ones. They come on tape so you can pick and place them very easily and They do have a couple different Families here, I think the DT series is very cool, but in case you're like, oh man, I want like that kit too you can get That same design kit that was shown off in this thread here with like all the different sizes and like the demos and you can Feel them and click them to your heart's content Go to digikey.com slash and slash supplier center slash snap Tron and then Scroll down here and you can pick up your dome kit for free. They give it. It's a sample I believe they will ship it to you if you give them your your name and address But some of the series that I thought was very neat here was, you know, particularly the The dual tactile dome S switch So what's neat about this is There's two Two contacts. There's first like this. So you solder in these three Pads and then this one is left kind of like floating and so when you first press This contact will touch first and then when you press in even more the center contact goes in and And here's that this detail about the peel in place Choose a little more. This is kind of neat. So, you know, you're ready to go sheets that you just press on So instead of picking a placing like dozens of switches, you just paste You tape this on, you know, using a jig and then all of your buttons are placed instantaneously because you don't actually need to solder them Down they can make they can use mechanical contact Instead of soldering, although you can solder these as well So these are dual. So I get distracted. These are the dual series and This is how You know, you soldered in and then you see this part makes contact first and then the second contact So there's you can have up to two Detections for like soft and hard press and You can also get them with or without the ability to have a backlight. Which is also very neat So these are all available at digikey. So if you just search for metal dome switch and They're gonna be under tactile switches and there's a couple other vendors But you know, I'll say snaptron very clearly like kind of has the market here You can get different operating forces. They do start kind of higher than tactile switches and You're also going to see like, you know, they're also gonna be you know, the word Metal, you know, it's in in the description of other ones Even though the ones that have the the hole for back illumination, you're gonna want the LED behind the PCB So it's gonna be reverse mount that's going to be It's it's gonna cut be called non illuminated. So let's go for active snap dome and Then this will get rid of like some of these, you know, random things that came in so you can see like snaptron really kind of like has Kind of has this whole thing nailed down like just searching for Snap metal dome is what you get but they do have them in multiple different sizes With lots and lots of stocks. So 10 6 8, you know every any size millimeter from very large to very small The dual touch the ones that it's like you can press and then press again. Those are called DT BL means that they have the hole and I think like the next two numbers are the Yeah, that this number the 12 means 12 by 12 millimeter and then 450 n is the Amount of force you need to press it. So, you know, this these are both dual touch back lit 12 millimeter and This one is 540 and so it's gonna be very tough to press and this is the 340 and a lot lighter to press So, you know pick and choose from from your desired setup. There's tons and tons in stock There's also these that are they're non dual touch. It's like you just press once But I like the dual touch ones. I thought we're pretty cool. So I Think my pick is going to be. Oh, I don't know this one went on Dual touch and backlit very cool. I didn't know that you could even do that with Metal dome switches. So I learned a lot today. So this is my pick for the great search That's research