KBK update for Sunday, 16th January

Thanks to a “Lukas” from Austria, some interesting information about B2H Hall effect switches and their B2HK keycaps has come to light. B2H and B2KH were described in detail in the JEE, Journal of Electronic Engineering article Hall IC Keyboard Switches Become the Leading Type by Yoshikazu Kitao. Google Books has numerous volumes of this journal scanned—which is what Lukas found—although Google or the submitter (the University of Michigan) have done a monumentally bad job of the process. You can search for terms and see a portion of the page in context, but there is nothing to indicate the issue in which the result was found. For example, there is a “block diagram of a contactless keyboard switch” on “Page 60” somewhere between issue 133 and 144, with no guarantee that these are even the correct page numbers. Instead of treating each issue separately, they appear to have scanned entire volumes as single documents. Although the request seems unlikely to succeed, the Linda Hall Library may be able to scan in the B2H article: this depends entirely on whether they are able pay the appropriate copyright royalty payment to its Japanese publisher.

In the meantime, we now have the switch height (29 mm, same as B2R), an explanation of the model numbers and the different operating forces. This tells us that B2H-F7W is a tactile model (“F”) with open collector outputs (“7”). The “W” suffix is not known to be covered and may indicate a PCB-mount model.

Further, we have some brief explanations of some of the subdivisions of the B2KH keycap series, that has now been moved to its own page. B2H has yet to be split off, as the page still shares material with B2R and B2A, of which not enough is yet known.

View within the updates for 2022

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