Keyboard Builders' Digest / Projects

Red Herring solenoid edition

Ming-Gih Lam updated the Red Herring PCB with an on-board solenoid.

KBD.news
Published March 17, 2022

After using the Red Herring with silent Alpaca switches, Ming-Gih Lam aka dcpedit realized that things were a bit too "quiet", and

I was craving something with a bit more punch.

The author originally toyed around with the idea of a bolt-on solution but eventually ended up with integrating the solenoid into the PCB.

What you see here is the resulting monstrosity that will absolutely annoy anyone within a 100ft of your desk – dj_edit.

Sound test with the solenoid off and on:

Github repo: https://github.com/dcpedit/redherring

Some more pictures: https://imgur.com/a/DLTToja

The actual component is just a random 4.5v solenoid available on Amazon.

Unfortunately, the cheaper and more popular SparkFun solenoid didn't work for some reason, dcpedit thinks it requires slightly more power than what the USB port was able to provide.

Published on Thu 17th Mar 2022. Featured in KBD #70 (source).

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