I Think My Switch Is Stuck! - The Tale of Cherry MX Locks
Over the years of collecting mechanical keyboard switches, I’ve been lucky enough to have encountered dozens upon dozens of rare and unique ones that have stuck in my mind to this day. Prototypes, factory errors, and even a few switches so rare that there is literally zero documentation about them anywhere in the world all fill that personal list from top to bottom. However, I realize that talking about switches so far outside of most people’s reaches, and even sometimes my own grasp, doesn’t make for the most exciting of articles about switches. To this newest generation of keyboard enthusiasts, though, there is one pretty rare MX-style switch which has made its way to the top of everyone’s “must try” lists – Cherry MX Locks. These often undiscussed and even more rarely seen switches are something that few people have seen and even fewer have had the chance to try at a meetup before. However, the list of people who really know how these unique Cherry switches work is even shorter...
Jul 23, 2024
I have finished my small DIY project with this switch I mentioned earlier. I chose not to wait to get the switch from Massdrop, but directly purchased from Novel Keys themselves.
I laid out a 6cm*6cm PCB for the big switch, used a pro micro as the controller and put 4 WS2812B RGB LEDs onto the board, as well as a small push button to control the light. It was not easy soldering the SMD LEDs by hand when I don't have access to a small tip soldering iron, but thankfully managed to do that without a major failure.
(The lay out is ugly, for a board like this I just used auto routing)
Here's a picture of how the PCB fit, before I put the components on there
I chose qmk as the base for the firmware, and wrote a set of configs for a two key keyboard, compiled them with msys2 on my PC and flashed it into the pro micro, and...... It works!
And that was my small project, hope you'll find it a little interesting. Let me know if you are doing something similar and need help or whatsoever.
The RGB is set to loop between colors in a smooth fashion, here are some more pictures