Crystal 24mm HBFS, Harder, Better, Faster, Silent. These buttons are a great addition to any fighting stick.
The guys at Gamerfinger wanted to bring a more responsive, longer lasting, silent button to the market and they hit the mark on all points!
GamerFinger HBFS-24 Crystal buttons come with a standard Red Cherry MX switch but can be modified to have any of the 4 different Cherry MS switches available to customize them to your desired setting. The stock button comes as follows:
- SWITCH: Cherry MX Keyswitch "Linear feel" Red keystem
- Life (at 5 V, 1mA, no load): 50 million cycle
- Operating Force: 45g
- Operation Travel: 2.0mm
- Total Travel: 2.5mm
Keyboard Co. gives a great history and description of the Cherry MX.
Here is a brief summary of the swtiches available and their differences.
(To all the the physics geeks, I realize that a gram is a unit of mass, but in this sense it is short hand for gram-force. If you need to request the numbers in Newtons, then you can probably do the calculation yourself, if not go here)
Red and Black are the "linear" switches. This means just like most Japanese button microswitches you will not feel the click or bump when you push the switch. It will have a smooth sliding motion. The red switch, standard in the HBFS, requires 45g to actuate while the black requires 30% more, at 60g for actuation.
The next style of switch is a "tactile" switch which gives a mechanical "bump" on acutaution. There are two styles of this. The first is the Brown style switch which has no audible "click" but has a bump on actuaion. This switch requires 55g of force for actuation:
Finally you have Cherry MX Blue Switches that are a tactile "clicky" switch. These switches have a palpable and audible "snap" or "click". Because these click on activation, before they are depressed all the way, the mechanical feedback allows you to shorten your button presses and possible speed up execution.
Animated Cherry MX images from Lethal Squirrel on Geekhack.org.
Dimensions of the switches are shown by the following diagrams from Gamerfinger:
