1mm pitch flex cable passthrough

By popular demand, the breakout/passthrough combination boards family now includes a 1mm pitch variant:

This version handles up to 30 signals which seems to be a practical limit of most 1mm FPC connectors. Each signal is numbered and brought to a 0.1 in spacing header for easy connection to your favorite logger/analyzer/scope. Continue reading

Flex cable passthrough breakout- 0.5mm

Introduction

Front side

Front side

Here is a product whose origin lies in the pain and suffering of an actual development project. Imagine you have a shiny new display made somewhere out there in a world that comes with a demo board and some datasheets.  So you take a display, hook it up to your favorite development board and try to follow the documentation. Except nothing works. And yet a a demo next to you works well, but is very tiny, has no test points and not documented. So you poke at the fine pitch flex connector with a scope for a bit, and realize you need a better way to capture what’s going on. Off you go to the lab and cobble together what is essentially a pass-through: two FPC breakout boards back to back, with a 0.1″ header in between.

How it started

Now you can hook up your trusty Saleae Logic analyzer and look at what the demo board is actually sending down as opposed to what the datasheet says it should. This board is exactly that, but made into one neat package. It can handle standard 0.5mm pitch FPC connectors up to 40 pins wide.

Continue reading

Kicky Dude kit instructions

This came out from a need to scratch a personal itch. We needed a prompter to give signals when and where to kick the target for our Taekwondo practice. So we made a little dude who stands and beeps/blinks semi-randomly to show kick location. It’s a perfect kit to put together with a child as there are few parts and they are large and easy to solder. There are 59 total solder joints to make. Continue reading

Sharp Memory LCD Breakout A2

This is a simple breakout board for Sharp’s Memory LCD display family (LS013B4DN02, LS013B4DN04, LS013B7DH03, LS013B7DH06LS027B7DH01 and LS044Q7DH01). Those are the parts known at the time of the writing, though more models are coming out all the time. So far Sharp’s been keeping very consistent interface and there is a fairly high chance the board will work with all of them. In a table below is a list of displays I am aware of on the US market. Models needing 5V boost are marked accordingly.

The board brings all pins to a 0.1″ header and provides necessary caps and resistors. Revision A2 adds an optional boost converter for those wanting to run 5V display from sub 3.3V supply which is needed on color version, 2.7″ and larger screens and also some of the older ones.The footprints are there, but parts are not populated to save cost on the base version. A version with boost is now also available. This is an open design under CC BY SA license.

Continue reading