Testing Cable, Student involvement

We are testing various methods to assemble the ribbon cable whips that contain the LEDs and pressure sensor for each pixel.

The two theories so far are to use 20 conductor ribbon cable and split it into 4 5-wire sections. Each section will service one pixel and on the board-end the individual wires could be crimped and put into headers soldered to the board.

Another option is to use sections of 10-conductor and use it with press-on ribbon cable ends (10-conductor). Only 5 individual wires would be used, which translates to one of the 2 rows of the cable connector. This results in wire waste but is faster than doing individual wires with various crimp-on connectors.

As soon as we figure out the "best" way to do this we are going to be calling out to all interested students to help us prepare these ribbon cables. There will have to be 512 of them (1 for each pixel) regardless of how they're arranged. It is time-consuming by itself but a group of people, motivated by free food) can get it done in reasonable time.

We will need people to cut the cable, strip it, make pressure sensors, solder the LEDs and sensors to one end of the cable and attach whatever connection method is used to the other end.

We will let interested people know via this site and e-mail when, and how, they can get involved.