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Seeking your opinion about an Experimenting with Flat Flexible Cables

rscasny

imageLaunching an Experimenting Challenge can be a lengthy process. In general, we have a lot of meetings with the sponsor and a lot of brainstorming within the element14 team. Even choosing the prizes takes some time, with back and forth between us. Perhaps the thing that takes the most time is choosing the products. Sometimes I suggest products that I think will will work. Other times it's a collaboration between element14 and the sponsor. And sometimes we choose a product because it's something new; a good example of that is gesture sensors.

Recently, we were approached by a sponsor who makes flat flexible cables (FFCs) and would like to see element14 members experiment with them. There is a growing use of them, especially for space-constrained electronic sub-assemblies. And some of these FFCs have special characteristics such as EMI protection, hi temp environments, low voltage differential for signal integrity, impedance matching, and so on.

But designing an Experimenting Challenge means building the activity, the kit, and the experiments. That's where I like to ask community members. At face value, offering an Experimenting Challenge with FFCs seems like a hill to climb. Do we just send a kit of FFC's to the participants and see what they do? Or do we add in some other products to fill out the kit. (I did this with the Experimenting with Waterproof Connectors Challenge by adding a imageDFRobot SBC.) Of course, the more specific we get, the more specific (circuit count, length, & pitch, for instance) the FFCs would need to be.

But right now, I would like to toss around some ideas of how we could frame an Experimenting Challenge with FFCs. What should be in the kit? Types of experiments? Even, the kinds of prizes you would like to see for this activity. For myself, I see FFCs as a product we haven't talked about that much, but complements a lot of different kinds of electronics. I suspect that a lot of creative content and blogs could be created for this kind of activity.

Here are some relevant links:

Webpage

Essentials

If you have any thoughts about an Experimenting with FFCs challenge, I invite you to write a comment below.

Some polls

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  • This could be a very interesting challenge.

    I remember in the early days we had to worry about the transmission line characteristics of flat cables and EMI effects.

    I am always surprised at the speeds the current cables can support.

    As for testing these types of cables, you do have a broad range of tests you could run, each with its own set of required equipment.

    I would like to see some testing done on propagation delays with length of cables. Capacitance and EM effects with ferrite cores. EMI effects. Transmission effects when the cable is placed over a CPU or memory chip. Induced EMI due to magnets.

    The sky is the limit to what you could do with just simple tests.

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  • This could be a very interesting challenge.

    I remember in the early days we had to worry about the transmission line characteristics of flat cables and EMI effects.

    I am always surprised at the speeds the current cables can support.

    As for testing these types of cables, you do have a broad range of tests you could run, each with its own set of required equipment.

    I would like to see some testing done on propagation delays with length of cables. Capacitance and EM effects with ferrite cores. EMI effects. Transmission effects when the cable is placed over a CPU or memory chip. Induced EMI due to magnets.

    The sky is the limit to what you could do with just simple tests.

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