 a great search brought to you by Digikey. And for this time of the week, every single week, one lady to use their power of engineering to show you how to find things on digikey.com lady, what is a great search of the week this week? This week, I'm looking for a surface mount USB connector for this tester that I've designed. So let's go to the computer and I'll show the part in question. So the original board that I'm revising had a through hole had all through hole parts, which was, you know, great and everything, but these had to be assembled by hand. And I kind of, I'm a little, I don't want to do that. I want to, you know, make 50 of these. Once I, once I get the test design done, because we use these in so many boards, I want to just do a run of 50 and not have to hand solder them anymore. So this is like the classic through hole USB-A connector and it's great and everything. But for this new version, again, I really want it to be as SMT-ified as possible. And I did have like one, you know, you can see this as an SMT USB-A. I'm not necessarily going to go with this connector. This is just the connector that was in my library because I'd used it before. So I put it in as a placeholder, but let's go and find a possible, some possible alternatives for the through hole USB-A in surface mount on Digi-Key. So let's go, well, not translate, but Digi-Key, not Digi. Okay. So let's go to USB type A. That's the thin long one. You're like, why don't use USB-C? I don't actually know how to deal with the host side of USB-C. I just want to do USB-A because it's like, I know what I just want. Ground, D plus, D minus and five volts. Okay. A lot of options, connectors. Here you go. So I want USB connectors. It even has the photo of the USB-A connector. So I want connector assemblies. It was about 3,000. So let's take a look. Yeah, these look right. I mean, this is actually starting to look like these are USB-As and all sorts of shapes and sizes. This is kind of a cool vertical USB-C, classic USB-B. All right. So let's start with, we only want the active products. Okay. And then we only want one port. So that's a really easy second filter. Next up, connector type, right? Like this is, you know, all the connectors that are sort of similar DVI and HDMI and ethernet, whatever, they're all kind of in the same area. And there's, you know, there's micro-B, micro-A. I've actually used like micro-A, but I really do want to have just that standard, chunky, classic type-A connector. You know, I don't need to save space. And moreover, I want to be very user-friendly because people are going to be using it. It might be like, what is this weird, like micro-AB is like a very weird connector, to be honest. Okay. So I selected the A. There's a couple versions here, but I selected all three of them. I also pick up the dash. Okay. And then we're down to 600 components. Number of contacts. So actually, no, we'll look at that later. Okay. Plug a receptacle. We want receptacle because we're going to plug in a USB cable into this. Cool. See how we're doing. Okay. Yeah. We still have some good options here. These are all looking about right. After I do a couple of searches, I like to go down and just make sure, like, am I on track? Okay. So let's now do the mounting style because that's where you want surface mount. So there's board edge, cut out surface mount. Select those. We don't want free hanging or panel mount and then surface mount, through hole. Now a note, if you see through hole after surface mount, it's still mostly surface mount, but it might have a through hole board guide or tab or something. So it's okay as long as the surface mount comes at the beginning. So let's apply. Okay. Now we're really, we've really cut it down to 85 bits. Okay. So the next thing is, some of these are USB two or three, sorry, USB three or four or whatever. And so they'll have more contacts than the classic four contacts. I really want just four contacts. I don't want anything special. I don't want USB three. So let's do that. And then those are like a lot of them are in stocks. That's kind of good. So let's look at normally stocking. And it's excluding marketplace. So get down to 45 options. Okay. Cool. To next step, these actually look pretty good. So there's a couple of things here that I noticed when I looked. So you see how this has like a little, like a hooky thing. So even though this is surface mount, I feel like the pick in place is going to have a lot of trouble getting those springy bits to push through because there's, you know, they'd push through and then they'd spring hold up against the PCB. So this is surface mount, but it's, I think it's, I feel like it's hand assembled. I don't know. We might not have to be where something like this is definitely surface mount only like there's no through hole sections. There's also a few that have something like this where if you see the plastic, this is literally going through the board, which I don't want. This is what was categorized as board edge cut out, you know, the board itself has a rectangular slot. This means that you can have like the, you know, the connector in line with the PCB, which is kind of sometimes for enclosure design. It's actually quite nice because you have a clamshell with two halves cut out. And then, you know, the USB goes in the middle and half is on each side. Honestly, I don't, you know, for my, for my uses, I don't want that. So I'm going to get rid of the board edge cut out options. And the next thing is I do want to pick and place this. So I'm going to go only with cut tape, did you reel and tape and reel a bunch of these come on tray. And I'm not going to, it's like, no, I need to, I want this to go to the pick and place machine. So let's apply. Okay. So finally, what I did is I actually, you know, some of these were good. So this is actually kind of what I have already now, but I actually looked at quantity available, because this gave me a good idea of what was a good well supported one. And so again, this is close to what I have on the board itself. The issue is, is that, you know, there's a lot of leverage there. It's very easy. Somebody pulls on the PCB and they pull on that the PCB or the on the connector and those USB type A connectors on cables are like amazing levers. They're like long and they're like extremely strong and they're molded. I feel like somebody just yank and they would just yank that's, you know, the pads right off. This one's a little bit better. It has two sets of pads. So I feel like this would, you know, if you really wanted to do service not only this would probably survive better. Again, these are good, but I just don't know if the pick in place would be able to get this through to the PCB. So what I really liked was these M phenol connectors, which will also very popular. And the reason I like these is they do have a through hole tab, but the tab doesn't have like a massive kink in it. It's like, I feel like it could, it's, it'll, it'll push through and you know, you can even make the slots a little wider. So maybe there isn't anything in the way, but then you have a paste on the pads and it kind of solders it in place, sort of like how surface mount USB type C connectors work, right? You have, it's pick in place and then you have these slots and slots, you know, you have paste on top of them and they just give a little bit of mechanical through connection to the PCB and gives it some strength. So I really liked this connector quite a bit. And what's interesting is if you look at the data sheet, they actually have two versions. They say, look, if you have a low-cost machining process, you can drill a hole. Look if you can have a hole that's plated, but it's only good for like 1500 cycles. But they're like, look, if you can get a slot, an actual slot, you'll have less leeway. This is good for up to 9,000 cycles or if you use, I guess, this other part, 12,000 cycles. So I thought that was actually kind of interesting. They actually gave you two options for how to have footprint for this USB connector with different reliability. Either way, I don't, you know, I'm happy with 1500 cycles or I'll do the slots, you know, just for the heck of it. But I rather like this parts. This was my pick. It's actually expensive either. It's, you know, 75 cents, less than a dollar in quantity, and comes on tape and reel. And it's a great church.