Hot plug refers to the way in which the shaft body is connected to the circuit board in a mechanical keyboard. Hot swap means live plug. When the keyboard is powered on, the shaft body can also be pulled out or inserted. Hot swap of sleeve and hot swap of shaft seat are both implementation methods of hot swap.

The sleeve, also known as "copper corns", is a metal sleeve on the pin of the mechanical switch. If the metal sleeve is pre-welded to the circuit board, the keyboard can have the ability of hot swapping. Simple implementation, suitable for any keyboard circuit board, all welded keyboards can be converted into hot swap keyboards in this way. However, the sleeve hot swap of the mechanical keyboard has poor compatibility with the shaft body, and can only be compatible with some relatively thin pins. For example, Gort and Cantent equiaxial bodies. Currently, most sockets hot-swap keyboards produced in quantity are also equipped with Gort's shaft bodies. Sockets hot-swap are generally not compatible with TTC, Kaiwa and Jiadalon equiaxial bodies. The shape of the circular metal sleeve is fixed, and the mechanical switch pin is not closely connected with it, which is easy to have poor contact, leading to key combination, failure, etc., and only the mechanical switch of the fine pin can be used. There are many thick pin switches that need to be cut to set into, and the sleeve may be incompatible with the different pin thickness, so the compatibility is not strong and the life is not long.

(sleeve)

(Sleeve on circuit board)

The shaft seat, a connector consisting of a plastic block with an elastic metal clip, is also pre-soldered to the circuit board to enable the keyboard to be hot-swappable. The more common shaft seat includes Kai Hua, Jiadalon and TTC. The shaft seat has good hot-swap compatibility and smooth use experience. The connection is more stable than the sleeve, and it is not easy to appear bad contact. Individual pcb with poor quality may have shaft block welding, or the shaft block is removed because of improper operation. Because different shaft blocks have different shaft bodies, the parameters of the pins are somewhat different, so the same shaft body placed on different coaxial seats sometimes will have different tightness.

(shaft seat)

(shaft seat on circuit board)

In general, the sleeve compatibility is not good, but the price is cheap, the current more recommended is the shaft seat hot swap. This is more compatible than sleeves, which may not be compatible due to different pin sizes. But the shaft seat is always a miracle, in the installation of the shaft, the original welding on the circuit board of the shaft off, if you want to welding the circuit board into a hot plug, it is very difficult. The shaft seat and the sleeve each have advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of hot swapping is that tweezers or shaft extractors can be used to complete the replacement of mechanical switches from the outside of the keyboard, but do not think that hot swapping is good, or welding is good, each has its own advantages and disadvantages, we consider the choice is good.