Keyboard Builders' Digest / Tips & Tricks
Transparent hotswap sockets
After colorful ones, Chosfox announced transparent hotswap sockets.
Published June 11, 2022
Just wrote about Durock's vivid hotswap sockets and Chosfox announces transparent ones the same day:
Heard you guys like transparent keyboards… – chosfoxmk.
Product page at the end of the post but it's worth to read the write-up, I promise. ;)
Rated for 500 hotswap cycles ("Plug and pull life up to 500 times") this one is somewhere between the classic Kailh and colorful Durock sockets (100) and the gen 2 Kailh ones (6,000).
According to the description, these sockets have "aircraft-grade contact heads", and the interior is gold-plated to improve oxidation resistance.
I reached out to Robin and he was kind enough to answer my questions so here is some more info for ya:
Chosfox has sold Kailh's color hotswap sockets for a while but wanted to make a transparent one so they asked a manufacturer to make some.
They prefer not to disclose the name of their partner at the moment because the product is "not in mass production yet" – which doesn't mean this is a limited first batch but they are only getting a few batches of 2,000 sockets at once.
We wanted to make this transparent hotswap as we want to make a transparent keyboard one day, this is our baby step – Robin.
The description on the product page stresses that the melting point of the housing material is 250°C / 480°F and you are asked to keep this in mind when soldering.
That's because the material used for the housing is different than that of other common sockets on the market – which by the way are prone to melting too, at least in my experience.
Anyways, if you are interested, Chosfox offered you a discount ($5 off orders over, coupon code: KBDNEWS). Use it here: https://chosfox.com/products/transparent-hot-swap-pcb-sockets.
And if you really want to build a fully transparent keyboard, here is a transparent PCB. ;)
Published on Sat 11th Jun 2022. Featured in KBD #82 (source).
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