3D Printed Maglev Switches Are So Hot Right Now

It doesn’t happen all the time, but over the years we’ve noticed that once we feature a project, a number of very similar builds often find themselves in our tip line before too long. Of course, these aren’t copycats; not enough time has passed for some competitive maker to spin up their own version. No, most of the time it’s somebody else who was working on a very similar project in isolation, and who now for the first time realizes they aren’t alone.


Thanks to this phenomenon we’re happy to report that yet another 3D printable magnetic levitation switch has come to light. Developed by [famichu], this take on the concept is markedly different from what we’ve seen previously, which in a way makes the whole thing even more impressive. It’s one thing for multiple hackers to develop similar projects independently of each other, as the end goal often dictates the nature of the design itself. But here we’re seeing a project that took the same core concepts and ran in a different direction.


So what makes the MagLev Switch MX different from [riskable]’s recently released void_switch? In a word, convention. It seems that [famichu] wanted to create a magnetic switch that operated in more or less the same way a traditional Cherry MX switch does, while the void_switch represents a re-imagining of how keyboard switches should work entirely. So for example, rather than putting all the Hall effect sensors on the main PCB so there’s no need to make an electrical connecti ..

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