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I am just beginning my journey into the Arduino world - plenty of development experience, but basically nothing with electronics outside of building computers.

The question I have involves wiring schematics - specifically for a button matrix, but it does apply more broadly. Using this diagram and Fritzing mapping, I see numerous buttons connected to each other - presumably via soldering:

Diagram

Fritzing

My question is, can you use wire nuts (or, more specifically multi-slot lever connectors) such as these to simplify the connection process?

Levers

I apologize in advance if this seems obvious, but I get lost trying to understand how to connect this stuff because I'm so new to it all.

Thanks in advance!

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    that keypad can only detect one button press at a time ... if you press two buttons at once, then up to four button presses can be detected ... a diode at each switch can be used to prevent "ghost" button presses
    – jsotola
    Feb 16 at 2:42
  • Woah - good to know @jstola! I'm going to start looking into diodes now. So much to learn, but luckily this first project is mainly for a button/busy box for my 18-month old kid, so he's going to smash all the buttons and not care as much on whether they do everything individually or not. Definitely an excellent tip though!
    – Scott Salyer
    Feb 16 at 15:34
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    if you are expecting to press only one button at a time, then you can use a resistor array ... the input to the arduino would be a single wire connected to an analog input pin
    – jsotola
    Feb 16 at 21:22
  • Yet another thing I didn't know existed! This would make wiring SO much easier by not having to deal with so many individual resistors. If I could give you points on here, I totally would. Thank you!!
    – Scott Salyer
    Feb 16 at 23:50

1 Answer 1

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Assuming that "multi-slot lever connectors" is shorting the inserted wires together I see no reason why you could not use them.

If you are adverse to soldering consider using switches and cables commonly found in arcade machines instead.

Previously crimped cables ...

enter image description here

And arcade style micro switches ...

enter image description here

Can be combined / connected to form the switch matrix your designed above.

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  • Fantastic - I didn't even know these existed. Thank you!
    – Scott Salyer
    Feb 16 at 2:33

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