As you may or may not know, I’m the chief technical officer (CTO) at LogiSwitch. Our founder, Mike Pelkey, is a serial inventor and entrepreneur who has a long engineering career in industrial automation. LogiSwitch’s NoBounce line of ICs and switches is a result of Mike’s 40+ year career in electronic design engineering where he developed switch bounce solutions for automation applications.
Switches bounce. That’s what they do (see my Ultimate Guide to Switch Debounce). When you activate or deactivate a switch, it can bounce anywhere from 1 to 100+ times for a fraction of a second to 6 milliseconds (ms) or more. This isn’t an issue if the switch controls something like a light. It’s more problematic if the switch feeds a microcontroller performing some mission-critical or safety-critical task, in which case you want that microcontroller to see only a single transition for each switch activation.
Our NoBounce ICs come in 3-, 6-, and 9-channel configurations, and they are available in both lead through-hole (LTH) and surface-mount technology (SMT) packages.
They also come in two temptingly tasty flavors. Our LS10-Series ICs detect and reject any noise spikes and only pass the signal from the switch 20ms following the final bounce, where this delay is imperceptible for most applications. By comparison, in the case of LS100-Series ICs, the output follows the initial transition from the switch after only a few nanoseconds, after which the IC will not respond to any future transitions until 20ms following the final bounce. Furthermore, LS100-Series ICs support a single-wire handshake protocol, thereby freeing the programmer from having to keep track of the state of the switch.
I am currently evaluating an interesting application scenario. As part of this, I want to verify a new implementation against as many different types of switches as possible. I don’t want clean, shiny, new switches for this exercise. No siree Bob (sorry Bob). What I want is switches that have experienced life and seen better days. All types of 2-pin single pole single throw (SPST) ON-OFF switches and all types of 3-pin single pole double throw (SPDT) ON-ON and ON-OFF-ON switches. Pushbuttons (both momentary and latching), toggles, rockers, sliders… you name it, I want it.
Much like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, I rely on the kindness of strangers. So, if you happen to be in possession of a grotty old switch for which you have no further use, I would be extremely appreciative if you could drop it in the post to me at the following address:
Clive Maxfield
LogiSwitch
PO Box 6603
Huntsville, AL 35813
USA
