Contact bounce (also called chatter) is a common problem with mechanical switches and relays. Debounce or debouncing is an a hardware or software technique to eliminate this effect.
Contact bounce (also called chatter) is a common problem with mechanical switches and relays. Switch and relay contacts are usually made of springy metals. When the contacts strike together, their momentum and elasticity act together to cause them to bounce apart one or more times before making steady contact. The result is a rapidly pulsed electric current instead of a clean transition from zero to full current. The effect is usually unimportant in power circuits, but causes problems in some analogue and logic circuits that respond fast enough to misinterpret the on‑off pulses as a data stream.
By analogy, the term "debounce" has arisen in the software development industry to describe rate-limiting or throttling the frequency of a method's execution.
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