Help with finding the right inlet for a ribbon cable?

[atlantis737]

I have a fingerprint reader here that has a ribbon cable connector. I've contacted the maker of the ribbon cable, who referred me to Digi-Key Corporation. On their website, I have found this:

http://www.digikey.com/product-sear...t=0&page=1&quantity=0&ptm=0&fid=0&pageSize=25

Which seems like what I need in order to be able to plug this into a breadboard. But, I'm not sure, being fairly green in the world of ribbon cables.

Can I just order this and use the connector to wire this in to a breadboard, or do I need something different?

Thanks to anyone who can help!

 

[(*steve*)]

That part you've pointed to seems like a flat flex cable, not a flat flex connector.

In any case, what you need to know are the number of connectors and the pitch. Is that 20 conductors? Are the centres of those conductors 1/2mm apart (or are they 1.27mm apart, or 0.625mm, or even 1mm (all are possible)

Let's assume there are 20 conductors and they're placed on 0.5mm centres.

So you'd go here and select the various options.

When you do that and hit apply filters, you get a list like this

Note that there are single and double sided connectors here, I assume you want single sided. (and then you may need to consider whether you want top or bottom connections).

It's also worth putting a quantity of 1 in and applying that so you don't look at prices for quantities of thousands... (you get this)

Now let's look at the top one: Here

You will now notice a few things:

1) it's surface mount (there are no pins to place through holes)
2) the spacing between the pins doesn't match a breadboard.

Either of those reasons means you need to make an adapter board and the former means you need to be able to do soldering of surface mount components -- and a connector is not the easiest thing to do.

 

[jpanhalt]

It looks to me like that connector is designed for coupling that ribbon cable to wires. Note the "crimp area" in the drawing.



I guess, if you had a 0.1" header with the appropriate number of pins, you could crimp or solder the adapter to the header and use that to attach to your breadboard. It is possible to solder directly to the ribbon cable, but that may be a little more difficult.

John

 

[atlantis737]

Thank you very much steve!

There are 20 conductors, and they are very close together. I am going to assume they are .5mm apart, but I don't have anything with which I could gauge it.

I can certainly solder in wires to connect to the breadboard, I'm just not comfortable with doing solder work on such small connectors as I have on this ribbon cable.

 

[davenn]

any connector for that is going to have a very fine set of solder connections and most likely for surface mount use .... it wont be directly connected to a BB you would have to do a separate cable between the connector and the BB

here's a pic of the same style of cable and its assoc connector

cheers
Dave

 

[(*steve*)]

There are 20 conductors, and they are very close together. I am going to assume they are .5mm apart, but I don't have anything with which I could gauge it.

Take a ruler marked in mm. the distance from the start of the first conductor, to the start of the 19th conductor should measure 9mm (18 times the pitch).

I can certainly solder in wires to connect to the breadboard, I'm just not comfortable with doing solder work on such small connectors as I have on this ribbon cable.

Yeah, the connector is not going to have more widely spaced connectors, and that's why you probably need an adapter board. Unfortunately you probably can't just buy one.

I googled "flat flex breakout" (flat flex breadboard" might be another to try) and found a few hits, unfortunately the most promising one was from 2000 :-(

 

[atlantis737]

I found another option that I might have, to cut very carefully up the ribbon to separate each wire, thereby making it easier to solder. Would that be something I should try?

 

[(*steve*)]

You could try.

They are not really wires, they are copper foil on a flexible substrate (they're very much like a kind of flexible printed circuit board).

If you can get wire wrap wire, you may be able to solder the wires more easily as this type of wire is silver plated and *very* easy to solder. Unfortunately the wire is also quite thin and may be a little tricky to reliably insert into a breadboard