Construction of perfect q-ary codes by switchings of simple components

We suggest a construction of perfect q-ary codes by sequential switchings of special-type components (called simple components) of the Hamming code. We prove that such components are minimal. The construction yields a lower bound on the number of different q-ary codes; this is presently the best known bound. We show that this bound cannot be substantially improved using switchings of components of this type.