 The Great Search brought to you by Digikey and Adafruit every single week. LadyData, user powers of engineering, WESU, find things on digikey.com. LadyData, what are you looking for this week? Okay, so this week, we've already done various great searches on FPC connectors and cables, but I need a specialty one this week. So let's go to the overhead and we'll show what I'm looking for and why. Okay, so we've got these boards called QT-Pies and these are adorable little microcontroller boards. And we've had like a wide variety of add-ons that we do, so hold on a second. So like, you know, we've got like a little keycap add-on. We've got a little add-on that adds like a button and a neopixel or an LED grid. Okay, so what I wanted to do is create an add-on that would let people connect the QT-Pie to our TFT displays. So almost all our TFT displays now come with an iSpy connector. This is a cute logo that Mr. Lady had come up with. And this is a flip-top 18-pin 0.5 millimeter pitch FPC cable. Looks like this, right? And then when you plug it into here, it brings all the IO connections for the TFT, like all of these pins down here, the SPI, the backlight, SD card, whatever, all come out this cable. And so you don't have to do like this gross wiring where you solder to all these pads. You just have this like slim, cute cable and it goes to whatever, you know, your peripheral is. And we've got a breakout that you can connect it to, you know, so you can have a cable a couple centimeters long. This is elsewhere. This is now easier to mount because you don't have all the wires. So I thought it would be cool if there was like something where like, oh, you know, this cable is, you know, kind of the same width as the QT-Pie like maybe you could plug in and then like so. And then you would have like, you know, ESP32 or SAMD 21 or RP2040 just driving your old display. You can make great little display projects. Very common. A lot of people like to use these TFT displays. So I did design a board and I used the same connector here. So this connector again, 18-pin 0.5 millimeter pitch. So I made like a breakout and I was like, well, maybe I'll have it like come out the middle because the issue I had is we can see that connector is like super, super tight fit. Like if you measure this connector, hold on, if I measure this connector. So if I measure between these two contacts, it's like 13.2 millimeters, just like, you know, a hair on it's basically 0.5 inches, right? It should be 0.5 inches. What happened is that this connector is 0.52 or 0.53. And so the connectors are actually bowed out a little bit and then I just bent the pins back in. But really, this connector should be narrower than one half inch because this, you know, this whole thing is 0.7, you know, the hair over 0.7. And then each one of these is exactly 0.1 inch. So, you know, it needs to be 0.5 inch or less. But the connector we've got right now isn't 0.5 inch or less. And actually realized it's, there's a lot of connectors are fairly wide. But we want to find one that is bottom contact. I do like the flip top because I feel like it makes it really easy for people like anything with, especially if I do something with this style flip top, you actually have a shot of opening and closing it. If it's a pull out, you know, usually the little ears are much wider and they're going to be hard to get in. So I want it flip top, bottom contact, 18 pin, 0.5 millimeter pitch. So let's go to the computer and I will take a look. So we were looking at this HDMI connector, which we're done with. So let's go back to Digikey and I'm going to look for FPC connector. Start with that. And I want a connector assembly and there's like 18,000. So it's a good shot that I have something here. Okay, a lot of options. This might be something, you know, just looking at the photos. Again, I like to look at the photos just to be like, am I on the right path? This one, you can see the width, you know, I can't, I'm moused over, but you can see how the contacts are in the center. And then there's just a lot of space on the sides for mechanical strength. This one too, like you can see the pins, the connector is significantly wider than the pins. I want something more like this, not like this. Let me see. I also like that, like this one, right? You see how it's like, it's not too much wider. Okay, so let's get the specifications we need out of the way. So number one, I want to be an active product in stock. I want it to be 18 contacts and the pitch is 0.5 millimeter. So that should, that should really pare down a lot of things. Yeah, we're down to like 100 out of 18,000. I also want to be in stock right now. Okay, so about 50 out of all those. The FBC thickness, I don't really, you know, I find that it doesn't really matter. Oh, I do need to have it be bottom contact. Right, I want that. And then I think I want flip lock, but I'll look at the slide locks in case there's something interesting there. Materials I do not care too much about. So it's about half of them are bottom contact. Okay, so then, you know, looking again, this one significantly wider. And I'll show you how to read the data sheets. This one, sorry, this one is not the useful data sheet, but like this one. Okay, so see how there's the pins and then the body is wider. But how wide is that body? Let's find out. You go to the data sheet and hopefully this one will be useful. It'll have the, yeah. So what happens is that for FPC connectors, you're not going to get like all of the measurements in the diagram. Instead, what you have to do is you look for like these letters. So in this case, I want to know the A width, right? So this width here. A is the total width. B is the width between the two pins. And then there's like C, which is like the, you know, connector with, I want A. And it's not always the same letter, by the way. And then you go down here and then you look up how many positions you have. And in this case, it's 18. And then they say A is 13.3. And I need, hold on, I want something that's 0.5 inches, which is 12.7. So I want like maybe 13, but really less than 12.7 millimeters. This is too wide. Too wide. This also, you know, sometimes I'm like, okay, this also looks too wide. This looks too wide. Maybe, maybe. You know, and so I started kind of looking through these and I was like, a lot of these are really wide. And then I was like, you know, first off, let me, you can't search my width, by the way. I was like thinking like, ooh, is there a size now? So I thought like, well, let's do it by price. And I can start with pricing because, you know, I want, I do want to have an inexpensive connector. And some of these were fairly promising. Some of them didn't have images. This is actually a vertical style. This is pointing up, which I don't want. Also fairly wide, fairly wide, kind of wide. And then I came down to this Amphenol one is like super wide, also wide, wide, wide. And then I came to this one. And I was like, ooh, that looks nice. You see how there's the contacts and then the mounting tabs, but it's, it's a very slim looking connector. So let's take a look. So again, what I want to look for is the A width, because this is the generic, you know, this is just like N pins. So I want A. So let's look down at A. So I have dimension A. And this is like weird because the contact quantities over here. Contact quantity 18 with 11.5, which is well less than 12.7. So this is my winner. And it's Amphenol. So they're like, you know, known to be good. And there's actually quite a few others, but the pricing is very good. You know, it's about 40 cents in quantity. And, you know, it's a nice, I like that it's gold plate over here. I like that it's flip lock. And Amphenol connectors are like pretty good quality connectors. I've never had any issues with them. So I'm not going to worry about like the little tab breaking off. So this is my great search find. That's a great search.