 The Great Search brought to you by DigiKey and Adafruit, thank you so much DigiKey. This is when Lady Adi is a part of Engineering WESU. Find the things you need on digikey.com. Search is an art. What are you looking for this time? So, not only is it like you have to search, but you have to know what you're looking for. That's right. Wow. Deep. Okay. So, I just finished a design for this Itsy Bitsy board, so let's go to the overhead real fast. I'll just show it really quickly. You know, this board, Itsy Bitsy, so this is a style of board that I use for small breakout boards designed to be as compact as possible, and I use a micro USB, and you know, maybe I should be using USB type C, but for stylistic and historic reasons, I've been kind of sticking to micro B. And this is a micro B connector I use. And one thing you'll note is that this micro B connector, I don't think I have any other micro B, this is kind of the only micro B board I have on me. Oh wait, no. I've got like this Pico board over here. And then this is a Pico, which is also using micro B, although they use a slightly different style, which I'll talk about. And micro B, you know, it's a little, it's a little easier to work with. You don't need separate resistors on the CC lines. It's a little bit smaller. A lot of people still have micro USB connectors. I realized we didn't cover this connector on the Great Search. So let's go to the computer and I'll talk about this. So one thing to watch for with micro USB connectors is you really, really, really want to make sure that they don't rip off. And so what I do is if you see here, these big, big ass pads, there's four legs on the micro USB connector that I use. And the part is surface mount, but then the legs are through hole. But it turns out that you don't need to hand solder them, because as long as you put enough solder on these pads, as long as you find them big enough, and then you pick and place the part in, it sits in and then as it mounts, the solder wicks in and holds it in place. And you get that mechanical strength of the slots or the holes going all the way through the PCB. One thing is you definitely need to do slots. You can't use hole because you have to have the cutout be exactly like 10% more than the size of the metal tab. It has to fit through, but it can't have too much space. You need that solder to go in and, you know, because it's not through a hole soldering, you're only getting that thin layer that the stencil is depositing, but you still want it to suction in and, like, grab that part real well. And then you can even see that a little bit of the solder melts. You can see it's well soldered because it's silver on the bottom, not gold. That means that solder from the top wicked all the way down, and so the part is being held by the entire, like, PCB structure. And, you know, when I first started using this particular component, I asked Mr. Lady Ada to use brute strength to try to rip it off, and he wasn't able to. And there were a lot of dead boards at the time that used fully surface mount, and those will absolutely just, like, tear right off the PCB if you don't have any enclosure or anything keeping it in place. So let's go do the key and find micro USB connectors that have those legs. When you want four legs, I'll show you another thing about legs. So if you search for micro USB, you'll see cables, adapters, and everything, but we just want the connectors. And you know, there's actually a lot, like, it's interesting, USB, DVI, HDMI connectors are all in one, but I only want micro USB, so I'm just going to filter here for micro. So there's micro A, ABB, and then B hybrid. You kind of just want micro B. Micro A and micro AB were used for, like, USB on the go, but, like, nobody, like, really used it as far as I could tell. Unless you're doing it on the go, just get the micro B. It's a little less confusing. And then let's also search only for active. And then let's look for in stock only and not marketplace. Just, you know, look at the ones that are available in stock. Okay. So now we're at context 10. Weird. I don't know what that's all about. I'm assuming that's a double connector, maybe. What is that? Oh, yeah. Oh, weird. Look at that. This is freaky. Oh, maybe this is, is it like USB, like this is the extended USB? I don't know. Kind of freaky. Um, we don't want that. So let's, uh, let's undo that connector type, no, number of contacts. We want five contacts, USB, power, data plus, data minus, ID and ground. And then we want to be a receptacle, not a plug. Plug is the thing that plugs in that's from the cable receptacle is what accepts the plug. Let's filter. And then so the only thing is the mounting type. It's confusing because again, we want surface map with through whole connector. So I actually don't, I'm not going to look at the mounting type because I'm a little worried that it's a little mix and match. Okay. So let's then look at what's available. So this is an example of a surface mount connector. So let's look at the model and you see how there's the, the pads was kind of nice. It's fully surface mount. It only connects to the top of the PCB. This is fine. If you have something, you know, on the bottom, you don't want to have the anything on the, the, uh, mounting tabs go through the bottom because you have something on the bottom. I understand. Totally cool. If you don't have an enclosure that keeps this in place, um, it's going to rip right off. So for like dev boards or anything, you know, if there's a chance of looseness, even though it has these like mechanical tabs here, believe me, you can, it can rip right off. So, uh, love this, but, uh, I don't love it so much. Okay. So then let's look. Here we are. Now we're talking. So there's a couple, you know, there's another surface mount one, another surface mount one. I happen to like these style and I'll tell you why. First off, you see those back legs, the ones near the SMT connectors. They're kind of wide apart. There's some that are, let me see if I can find it. Ooh, it's like a vertical style one. Let me look for, uh, horizontal because I don't want, I don't really want vertical. I think it's confusing. Um, I don't want the bottom entry and what horizontal, let's see if that gets rid of the vertical. The ones are cool. Uh, this is reverse, I'm just going to try to see if I can find one that has the pins close together. Hold on, let me sort by availability. Okay. I think this is an example of one that is, yeah. So see this one, the legs are a little closer and you need to have like very thin annular ring through whole, uh, holes, like pads. I like to have a little bit of like, again, a little bit of extra space because I don't want these pins, these mounting pads to short to the pins. Um, and I like to have a large annular ring because that means I have a good amount of solder. See like I have a nice big distance here. No risk of shorting between the two. Now while this one does have the four legs, it's not exactly what I'm looking for. Uh, and this one I think is only, is like, this one is I think a 50-50. It only has two through hole. Yeah. This one has two through hole and then two SMT in the back. This is probably okay, but I really want full, full four. So let's keep going. This one is the close one. I think this was the one. Yeah. I think this one, this one has a nice big distance. I like that these are large holes, mechanical, connect all the way through the body. This would be my pick because it's got four through hole tabs. The five SMT and the tabs are far apart and you have plenty of space to make big annular rings, lots of solder, big mechanical strength. Keep this from tearing off your PCB design. So this is my pick and the price is pretty good too. Lots in stock. That's a great search.