Connecting FFC Ribbon Cable to the Arduino

FFC breakout board alternative


It was about 1 am and I was tired of writing essays for my college apps, so I decided to mess around with a small LCD I bought, hoping to connect it to the Arduino. Luckily, after a couple minutes of googling, I found plenty of tutorials on the Arduino website. The pinouts seemed simple and I had all the components (actually just a 10K pot).
I pull out a handful of jumper wires and dig up my LCD ($3 Hantronix HDM16216L).
LCD ribbon connector
Yeah... I don't know if my jumper wires will fit in there...

After some more googling, I found the FFC breakout board, but $6.50 + shipping and waiting a week wouldn't satisfy my midnight curiosity.
I thought about trying to etch a PCB, but that was way too much work just to connect an LCD. Google didn't have any solutions either, so I decided to just solder wires right to the cable. Can't be worse than SMD soldering, right?

To prevent solder bridges and make everything a little easier, I found some nail-cutting scissors and seperated the wires. First attempt:
Ugly! Doesn't work :(
As you can see, it didn't work out too well. By the time I was done soldering the fourth wire, one had already fallen off. I ended up using electrical tape to isolate the connections, which looked horrible and didn't work. Upset, I gave up and went to bed.

For the second attempt, I picked up some thinner heat-shrink tubing from Radioshack and was a little more careful (probably because it wasn't the middle of the night and my hands weren't shaking from the cold).
Not too bad
Looks better...
Hello World sketch
... and it works!

Looking back, was it worth it? Yep. It wasn't that hard once I figured it out. With a pair of helping hands, I could probably solder a cable in 15 minutes.

If you want me to post more detailed pictures of the actual process, drop me an email.
By Daniel Mirskiy