Metallic housing for an electronic apparatus with a flat keyboard
AssigneeSharp Kabushiki Kaisha
InventorsShintaro Hashimoto, Shigeki Komaki, Akira Tanimoto
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Abstract
An upper member of a housing and a plurality of key actuators are unified into a single flat sheet made of stainless steel. The respective key actuators are made movable by providing a "U" shaped slot and a hinge at the corresponding limited regions of the stainless steel sheet. The hinge and key indicia are formed at the same time by a half etching step. When a particular one of the key actuators is actuated, a movable contact on a conductive silicon rubber sheet will come into contact with a stationary contact on a circuit board.
Claims2
A hand-held electronic calculator having a keyboard comprising:
- a housing having an upper member and a lower member for said hand-held electronic calculator, said upper member being made of metallic material;
- said upper metallic housing member of said housing constituting a plurality of key actuators, each of said key actuators being defined by a continuous slot which connects with itself and completely penetrates the upper metallic housing member;
- a flexible sheet fixed to the rear surface of the upper metallic housing member in a manner to cover all of the key actuators, said flexible sheet carrying an electrically non-conductive silicon rubber sheet and a plurality of electrically conductive silicon rubber contacts forming the movable contacts for the keyboard;
- and
- a plurality of stationary contacts including means for their support, disposed within said housing, said stationary contacts being positioned to correspond to said movable contacts, whereby a particular movable contact comes into contact with a particular stationary contact when a particular one of said key actuators is depressed.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.