Four long years have passed since I wrote the original Beginner’s Guide to Force Curves and a whole lot has changed since them. At least 1,300 small, tiny things have changed by my last count. It’s about time to revisit, revamp, and expand upon my introductory article on reading and interpreting force curves. Join me this week for (what is hopefully) A Better Beginner’s Guide to Force Curves!
As always, thank you all for the continued readership, love, and support week in and out. I’ve been meaning to get around to updating this guide for some time now and for whatever reason this just felt like the right week to do it. Hopefully it’ll draw even more people into the fascinating world of data that force curves offer!
Great article as always, and thanks again for maintaining such a helpful repository.
In regards to noise and interpreting it as scratch; is there a certain level of detail at which we should disregard the information in the graphs? Some graphs certainly seem more finely-populated with noise than others - is that amount of noise more luck of the draw / reflective of recording conditions than an actual recording of the switch’s travel texture? It seems to me that if we can feel it with our fingers, so could a highly-sensitive device - but if that amount of noise exists as semi-random garbage data in the background either way I suppose we really should be ignoring it.
This is a to-scale zoomed-in capture of two graphs from the repository:
The lines seem to depict varying levels of texture, or maybe scratch. Would this be a meaningless distinction when it comes to the accurate resolution of your machine? I’d say the depicted lines jive with my personal experience of the respective switches, but that really could be bias talking. If the above comparison is actually meaningless when it comes to force-curve data, I’ll be sure to edit my review that implies otherwise. Indeed if so, maybe some amount of smoothing should be applied, at least to the PDF graphs if not the raw data.
For those of us that swap springs, is it correct to assume that if the spring weight is changed and the spring is otherwise the same, the shape of the force curve remains the same?
You know I have considered this response for a few days now and I don’t disagree with you, however I am not entirely sure what it is explicitly recording nor if I could realistically or even should realistically try and account for such when displaying the data.
That being said, though, I don’t think the idea of having some degree of smoothing applied to the force curves to make them perhaps slightly more realistic might not be the worst of ideas. It could also better help represent the average curve of that switch as all switches from a batch will certainly have variations in this noise due to… well whatever causes that noise.
