Re: What are these things called?, Newbie question...

In message , bigbossfan80 writes

> It is connected using some type of light-green >plastic that looks like it has 8 or 9 thin, flat metal lines running >through it. I'm guessing that these metal lines are basically acting >the exact same as wires would, except they use these instead because >it saves a ton of room. >

I expect it's a flexible PCB. It may be a zebra strip as Don suggested, but these are usually for mounting an LCD almost directly onto a circuit board with no soldering, and give maybe 5mm spacing between the LCD and the main board. It could also be a FlexStrip, eg Farnell 650-500 (although I've never seen green ones) in which case you could just buy a longer one.

Extending by a few inches shouldn't cause any problems.

Cheers

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Keith Wootten
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Keith Wootten
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Zebra strip is a little rectangular strip of rubber, with lots of conductors perpendicular to the long axis. You lay it down across a set of contacts on the PC board (with spacing much greater than the conductor spacing in the zebra strip) and press the LCD into it. The idea is that you'll pick up at least one zebra-strip conductor on the PCB and LCD, and have at least one insulating layer between contacts. You can't really extend it at all.

The flat strip stuff is a replacement for ribbon cable. It has a much wider conductor spacing than zebra strip and each conductor goes to a pin on the relevant connector. I don't know what it's called beyond the brand names (flex cable?).

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Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
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Tim Wescott

I poke around in sci.electronics.misc a lot just out of interest. The other crossposted newsgroups I generally don't. See you 'round comp.cad.solidworks Wayne.

'Sporky'

Wayne Tiffany wrote:

Reply to
Sporkman

I once had a pile of fluke multimeters, and the assignment of combining the broken ones to make REALLY broken ones and a few working ones... These have a zebra strip in them that is a full inch long by two inches wide. And if you've shifted yours, if you've taken it out to look at it etc... then good luck getting it to work again. They use them because the contacts on the lcd are not solderable (not to mention being transparent and therefore nearly invisible). So you can't just replace them with wires. And the placement tolerance on them is very exact. As in you have to place it accurately to within a few thousandths of an inch, or you will have contacts being touched by two conductors, or two contacts being touched by one conductor... and you have to be this accurate on both ends. Not once did I manage it with the Flukes, even though I had many to try with. When a repair required moving the zebra strip, the display always had an element or two that were always-on or always-off afterward.

On the other hand, your description sounds more like a flexible PCB to me too... because zebra strips look like alternating colored and dark gray rubber. There's nothing metallic looking about them. And if it IS flexible PCB, then you can probably just use twisted pair cable (ribbon cable with every two adjacent conductors twisted around each other) to extend it. They use the flexible PCB in small electronics to make assembly easier, usually, so noise probably won't be a problem. Its not like lcd's are high frequency or anything, and the voltages used to get them to change state are pretty significant. The signal to noise ratio is very high...

Reply to
Joseph Hansen

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I don't think the problem was one of placement of the strip it is one of static damage to the LCD, been there, got the T shirt.

Reply to
Mjolinor

Yes, the strip is just a conduit, and its placement is fairly non-critical. It's the relative placement of what's touching both sides of it that's critical.

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John Miller
Email address: domain, n4vu.com; username, jsm
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John Miller

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