Backlighting Rubber Keypads

Backlighting Rubber Keypads also known as Backlit Rubber Keypad, Backlit Silicone Keyboard. 

Backlighting rubber keypad always with Light Emitting diodes (LEDs) provides a long life, low power backlighting solution for your HMI needs. 

When designing a device which need custom made backlighting rubber keypad, you may consider how it to create the rubber keypad backlighting.

In general, there are several commonly used methods.

1. Transparent elastomer silicone rubber button pad. Make full use of transparent & translucent silicone rubber material.

2. Spraying and laser engraving. Only the characters transmit light, the rest of keypad is black.

3. Silkscreen print on the top surface of semi-transparent silicone rubber keypad. 

4. Clear light pipes.

The principle of backlighting silicone rubber keypad is to utilize the translucent properties of silicone material.

The first method is to make full use of transparent & translucent silicone material. Such as 4x4 elastomer button pad, used in launchpad or MIDI pad controller.

The most simple method of backlighting your keypad is to silkscreen print legend onto a translucent keypad, this illuminates the entire keypad.

Another method is hollowing out printing. This means the normally printed legend is clear and the areas around the legend are printed.

The other common method is laser engraving.

Laser etching is used when selective backlighting is required such as illuminating only the text or symbols on a key. The laser etching method is slower however and so more expensive. That's because the rejection rate of laser engraved keypad is high with many processing issues. The blog here to introduce the common issues of spraying coated and laser etched keypads.

Mold clear light pipes are also used for backlighting.