Tactile Pi

[Indian Hobo]

I've made a couple of MintyPi's in the past, but the controls always were a downside for me (usually due to me screwing them up). I disliked the unresponsiveness and large travel time, so I decided to make a MintyPi with tactile buttons.

The buttons that I went with were "Uxcell 4mm x 3mm 4 Pins SMD SMT Ultrathin Momentary Push Buttons" from this link on amazon https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00E6 ... UTF8&psc=1 (they're out of stock at the time of this post).



I originally went with some buttons that looked like this:



These types of buttons are not optimal, since the "button" part and the body are so close to each other, that if the angle and placement aren't exact, they won't work.

In order to create an even surface for the tactile buttons to hit, I cut some small pieces of a broken PCB and hot glued them to the backs of my DS Lite buttons.

Button.jpg (2.18 MiB) Viewed 2975 times

I soldered the legs of the buttons to the button PCB pads. The method I used was to add a little solder to the pads, melt the solder of one side with my soldering iron, and place the tactile button on with tweezers. Then I melted the other side and pushed down on the button to make it level. Finally I checked that no connection errors were made by using a multimeter on the continuity setting to make sure the pads aren't connected when the button isn't pressed and that they are connected when the button is pressed. Make sure to solder the buttons in the right orientation so that the connected legs of the button are on the same side of the pad.

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20180112_183525.jpg (2.54 MiB) Viewed 2975 times

Here's the finished product:

20180113_214339.jpg (3.06 MiB) Viewed 2975 times

(I realize that picture doesn't really show anything to do with the tactile buttons. I was just proud)

These buttons really worked out great. I felt like I struck gold when I ordered these off of amazon after about two minutes of lazily scrolling. They ended up feeling great and having good responsiveness. Sometimes they will stop registering the button press if you ease up the pressure too much, but I'm happy nonetheless. If someone wants to make this or something similar, and they want more travel or a more loose feeling to the buttons, I would recommend using something thinner than a PCB for the underside of the DS Lite buttons. Pretty much any piece of flat plastic will do. A big thanks to Wermy, Helder, and the sudomod community for getting me to take a greater interest in electronics and try this out.

[wermy]

Awesome, thanks for sharing