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.

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First product for sale- Sharp Memory LCD breakout

I have a few of the LCD breakout boards available for sale.

Schematic diagram is here .

Note: the header is included but not soldered, to make life easier in case you need to run wires to the board instead. Sharp LCD is not included. You can get the 5V version (LS013B4DN02) from Mouser. Part number is 852-LS013B4DN02. The boards were tested with Arduino Uno driving the LCD directly with 5V IO. That seems to be fine for the display according to the Sharp Datasheet.

First solder the header or wires as needed, then attach the display using a small piece of double sided tape and connect the flex. See my previous post for pictures on how a fully assembled board should look like, and this post for testing details

Connections for Arduino  :

Breakout pin Arduino pin Breakout Pin Arduino  Pin
1 SCLK 13 6 EXTMODE 4
2 SI 11 7 GND GND
3 SCS 12 8 VCC 5V
4 EXTCOMIN 3
5 DISP 2

Shipping is via  USPS First Class Mail. Items in stock usually ship the next business day ARO. Allow a week or so for delivery in the US