 The great search brought to you by digikey and Ada fruit. This is the time of the week where lady issues you how to find the things You're looking for on digikey.com. What is a great search this week lady Ada? Okay for this week I was just chatting about how we're redoing a lot of our tft displays And we're adding any little connector that will make it easy to add a flex fpc To not require any soldering for attaching a tft display to a project or product and so on the computer I can go there. I designed this board that has The fpc connector here and then it connects to a raspberry pi header. You can just Plunk it onto a raspberry pi header. The ideal is would be fully assembled. No soldering is required And then you know you plug it on to a raspberry pi or actually any single board computer with that 2 by 20 header Almost all them now have the same standard header, which is like pretty sweet And then you would be able to plug in a tft display So like just less work less wiring effort and people are always kind of struggling with wiring This will make it so, you know, the flex sector goes in. You're good to go. So this Connector we use in a lot of our bonnets. So let's look at our bonnets. So for example This is a pack So this voice bonds example, so this bonnet what we do is we like to use a slim 2 by 20 connector on the back and The reason I like to use these slim style ones and their SMT is one if you're doing SMT, there's no hand soldering like it's even though these characters are like Kind of chunky and like hand placing limit, you know, sometimes it's required to come on tubes It's still a lot faster to place it and put it through the oven Then it is to hand solder 40 pins, especially if you don't have a selective solder machine So for you know, or even if you do, it's it's a very labor-intensive. It's a very messy process. So You know using these slim 2 by 20 headers is great Let's see if I can see another thing that's nice is that You can have these plated holes up top and then you can actually stick a stacking header through So something like this. It's this extra long stacking header. These pins go through the SMT header and through that holes like the SMT Legs go out so that these long legs can go through and means that you can stack multiple boards If you'd like as long as there's no pin incompatibilities or you can probe or you can attach other accessories. I think the The sense hat also did this if you look the sense hat Similarly has a 2 by 20 connector. What's interesting about how they did is actually they to save on Assembly costs this header here on the bottom actually is through hole and it sticks through and You can kind of see the little the little pads Here you can kind of see you can see the legs stick through and that's how it attaches It actually saved a little bit of money because they didn't do a double-sided process It's a one-side process SMT on the top and then just somebody Before they package it they stick a 2 by 20 Header through the pins go through the PCB through the header and make contact and some it's actually quite mechanically strong So it's another hack again to to save money You know a little bit less Assembly cost because a single anytime you do single-sided SMT is worth it only trade-off is you know SMT headers are gonna be more expensive than through whole headers they're not as common and Again, you know, you they're often don't come in a tape-and-reel You might be able to get them tape-and-reeled, but they often come tube or bulk because they're just so long So let's go to Did you key and Find this so I want to find header and You know, this is the closest image. I do like the new image search So it's a it's called a female receptacle rectangular connector Because I never quite remember the difference between like board to wire wire header connector rectangular I just type in header and then I just click on the image that and then I go. Yeah, that's right That's what they call these There's like a quarter million different items, but we're gonna we're gonna get through them very quickly So number one we only really want active or preliminary. So we're gonna select those and We only want to row Because we want the 2 by 20 connector So let's apply and that'll cut it in half. Great next step is the number of positions And we want 40 remember it's 2 by 20. So the number of positions total is 40 And then number of positions loaded is good to be all You're wondering like why would you have sometimes not It's actually not uncommon for there to be one pin missing because it's the key pin So like if you remember floppy drives, I think or like IDE drives, they had one pin that was like Filled in and that way you couldn't plug in the connector upside-down. So the only thing about I see connectors It's like it's kind of easy to flip them upside-down But we want all of the the connectors attached and then how we look in so yeah, these are looking pretty good These are all through a hole. So now oh, here's one SMT. So now we want to find Surface mount So we want surface mount not right angle. We want it to be pointing up And then the pitch that's important. So we want point one inch by point one inch So mating pitch is the pitch down the 20 connectors and the row pitch is the distance between sorry The row spacing is this is between but it's gonna be square point one inch by point one inch There's you already down to like only 500 options. So let's Let's take a look. All right, so yeah, they're looking pretty good So big low profile ultra low profile a Lot of good options here Okay, so the next app some of these you have board guides Next app. Let's only look at normally stocking. Although I will say actually that's not looking normally stocking Because actually there were a few things that were not normally stocking But maybe if the lead time is you always live with the lead time, it's worth it So the next thing is the height the insulation height So some of these are quite tall. They're the standard 7 millimeters high and remember we want to actually have it be slimmer So, um You know i'm not too picky about the height, but I definitely don't want it to be like the a and a half That normally is so i'm going to say, you know, maybe 5.2 or less height You know basically those those legs of the the stacking headers have to make it all the way through And then um, you know, let's say we're going to quote it at about 500 pieces And we're going to look at the options. So again, some of these are Um They're not available. They're not in stock, but the order looks expensive This one in particular was like it's kind of cheap and it actually looks pretty good um, but it's not in stock and it has the lead time of uh Four weeks, I think yeah So, you know the the question is You know what what's nice is that the price is low It's like, you know a dollar 28, which is a really good price for a 40 pin header But they're not gonna have it in stock right now. So this might be something where you're like, okay I'll I'll for when I go into manufacturing manufacturing I'll get this but for now there's um, this one actually came up in theirs It's not, you know, not too expensive. It's a couple dollars And um, it looks good. This one was uh Nice and slim and uh One thing I'll notice that you do watch out it has uh mounting nubs Let me see if I can You can see the mounting nubs here, um, so there's two mounting nubs which are actually Not like traditionally, you know, I I didn't normally used to have these on the headers, but um Now you see I have to make a little uh Yeah, it's a two millimeter hole and so you see that it actually affects the size of the um Annular ring around my through hole that would go through So instead of uh having it be like this nice chunky annular ring It's only a five millimeter annular ring, you know, it's a little bit close to the edge, but it's uh, it's okay I think it'll be fine, but um the mounting posts are good because um Especially if you're gonna have someone hand place these it just makes it so they don't skew, you know It's like once they sit in place. They're they're good to go So this one is actually pretty nice and you can tell it's definitely Um Hollow like you can see through it which is good. That means those long pins will Enter through and exit out the top So this is my pick The harwin m20 781 and it's in stock right now And that's just glenina Great search