Question for real engineers: MX cruciform ideal?

I think I already know the answer is no. From personal experience, MX stems can be highly inconsistent and perhaps difficult to manufacture. They are not really designed for repeated keycap swaps since the stems can “shrink” over time. Same goes for keycaps. They are all over the place and definitely deform over time.

So, my real question is, if we were to completely redesign keycaps and switches, what would make for an ideal design? How can we improve upon good ol’ MX stem with modern design/engineering tools to achieve more durable and consistent switch-keycap coupling? One idea I had was to use different material combinations which may work for one-off artisans but generally not ideal due to cost.

From what I recall browsing other threads - I don’t remember the authors, but it’s something closer to Romer-G, where the keycap is attached by the edges rather than the middle.

This has two big advantages:
1.) You have a lot more space to innovate on switch mechanisms. For example, no one so far has been able to implement buckling spring on the MX format, since the stem takes up a lot of room.
2.) Better light distribution for backlighting.

1 Like

Someone should make one where you gotta yolo it and cut the stems out of the caps lol

Something else I tihnk about is…

I don’t know if Cherry/GMK every manufactured these caps knowing that in the future, people would regularly take them off keyboards and change them out for non keyboard service reasons :joy:

3 Likes

Yeah too bad the Romers were not all that great to type on. But the shine-through feature was overlooked. Not entirely convinced they designed those switches for repeated keycap pulls.