 Everyone's favorite segment Digikey and Adafruit present This week's iron MPI is from Molex, okay. Well, we're doing another Molex when we did Molex custom cables a bit ago But I saw these pop up on digikey.com slash noon. I was like that's a good idea These are the Molex one touch FPC connectors So these are connectors for flex cables. We have flex cables in a lot of use cases I'll show you a couple in a bit and these are the two connectors. They've got ones that are Right angle and they've got ones that are vertical and you notice it has a little push bar It looks like like the you know an exit push bar from like a from a door And that does exactly what you think it's a way for you to connect and disconnect the flux cable from the Connector by pressing down to lease it so flex cables You know we see and they're using a lot of things they're used in you know, almost all electronics these days They're inexpensive. It's an easy way to have multiple contacts on a PCB you know, you don't have to do a lot of crimping if any and You basically can fit a lot of connectors into a flex cable because you can use point five millimeter millimeter pitch Which is not too hard to solder and your PCBs your flex PCBs or the precision is going to be good enough that you can Cram that many connectors and there's also point three millimeter. Although we tend to use point five These connectors are also point five. So, you know, for example, here's a TFT and there's a flex cable So that means it you know, they can bend quite easily and on the end you see one through fifty fifty connector points on the FPC And then you would plug it into an FPC connector So this is like a molex connector that we have that's a kind of like a pull push like an ears style I call them connector slide out or you know, whatever the technical name is for these and Basically, you see the contacts on the end because you can't solder a flex PCB directly to a circuit board Without causing strain and having it rip apart. What you do is you slide it into the connector the connector actually get sold Out of the PCB. So this is what the connector looks like when not in use. You see the little Brown part that slides out and there's two little ears on the side that you pull carefully out And then you can insert the flex PCB in as shown here on the PCB you see the ears are sticking out and then You push it in all the way and then you know, you insert the flex connector and you push in the little ears And you're good to go. So let's go to the overhead and I'll show what that looks like in person So here I've got like a nice cool square TFT display and this is a little breakout board that I've got that has that same FPC connector, like I said, it's a slide out style and you see there's these little ears I pull on them and then I can remove the FPC into the FPC contacts here And then there's top contact and bottom contact and then again if I want to insert it It's the wrong contact way. I'm just showing it for demonstration And then you have to squeeze this ear and you have to squeeze that ear So, you know, there's pretty much work and we use them a lot But there are some things you have to watch out for with these connectors, which is that They're extremely hard to rework and they are a mechanical part that if you have people doing repair or Maintenance on something with a flex connector. They can break and when they break it's kind of like catastrophic So, you know, you can see here on the left I don't know if you can zoom in on to the connector, but You know, basically if that little piece that moves Gets cracked or broken and from heat it can get cracked or broken. It's unrepairable And you know, you you can get replacement parts, but you can't like Yeah, there you go So you see like on the corner there it got cracked a little bit Either from heat or from mechanical strain and you basically have to replace the whole connector And there's a lot of like little plastic bits that can break on these FPCs and then really hard to rework Here's here's another one and you can see the whole thing just broke off, right? So that the you know, maybe it was you know, somebody flipped it up and it was stuck a little bit They didn't pull while flipping whatever either way It cracked off and broke and so it's really neat about these the Molex one touches is You know they come in different sizes and again, there's no like mechanical pull or flip part You push to release the part and so there's like one lesson that can go wrong The reason I mention this is that you know if you have a design that has these flex connectors And you're either assembling them in automated fashion or you have people and you know, they break one out of a hundred of them You you have to rework a board which can be like quite a bit of work and might damage other components on the board Because it's a big part you have to heat and remove And also takes time and it might be better if you just you know upgrade to one of these one touch connectors Because you don't have that Mechanical strain problem. You don't have this part that can break off. You just push to Remove the cable and it also locks in place. So maybe let me grab Yeah, they're available in Digikey the number that I use to find because there's a few different ones is 245 5440 that's the Molex or you can go to digikey.com for such short for such are and eight are W87 So I found my cat just let's go to the overhead again. So this time I'm going to again You have to like carefully Open up both ears and you never know like sometimes I actually break You know you can break these You have to be very careful with them. Okay, so this side and then this side Okay, and then you can remove so this is the one touch connector. So let's a little bit as you can see The push this is the push button here. Sorry. Yeah, this is the push button here It's kind of hard to see the there you go the engraving on it You've got the contacts and you've got the mechanical strain relief here to keep it in place and then to plug it in What's interesting is that you don't push to attach you actually just press in and It actually has kind of like a wide curved mouth thing So you don't have to like be careful like, you know, it'll it'll slide in all aligned properly And then, you know, it's nicely solid and then if you want to release you press so you saw I was pressing it And I guess you could also press if you want to insert, but you don't have to So there you go. So it's inserted press To release there you go. So so and they're good for 20 cycles This is the vertical type which I thought was kind of neat But they also have the right angle type. So Let's let's chance of you or the person doing the maintenance cracking off that piece So I think for that purpose alone And if you have a product that has this issue doing maintenance or rework or installation, you know, right? Because this is like part of your You know rework or yield issues Check out these connectors. They have them in, you know, 10 20 30 35 40 Maybe I think 50 pin maybe not 50 up to 40 pin connectors vertical horizontal and they use like pretty much the same footprint as existing molex FPCs I mean check the datasheet, you know, to make sure that you've got the exact right position for it the mechanical pads But chances are if you have a design that already uses FPC connectors You could probably swap these in without doing a huge board revision, right? You might have to just tweak a couple pads, but you're probably not not gonna have to move around a lot of parts So very interesting connector. I think it's an interesting innovation Because I've used pullout and flip top. I've never seen push to remove or push to insert type and we have video That's right. Well, it's made a nice video the easy on one-touch FFC FPC connectors by Molex These connectors feature single-step mating With an auto locknail mechanism a high retention force and an easy-to-use push button for unmating Offering a quick and reliable connection as well as easy operation makes the easy on one-touch FFC FPC connectors ideal for a host of industries and applications from smart appliances to various consumer and industrial uses The easy on point five millimeter pitch one-touch connector enables quick and easy FFC FPC cable insertion and mating operation via manual or automatic assembly The large lead-in helps avoid misalignment While the inside locking mechanism ensures superior retention push button to easily unlock the cable Other features include its high operating temperature optional ground terminal and right angle and vertical variations More information at molex.com