siemens s65 tft - part 1 - breakout & mount

By cun83 on 21:31

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Woot! My small TFT display arrived today, after only 2 days!
It's a mobile phone display for old Siemens phones (CX65/CX70/M65/S65/CXT70/CXV70).

Here is a picture of it:



 Now, all I need to do is solder onto the connector...

This display type is a bit bigger as the popular Nokia 6100 LCDs used in many hardware projects, and because it's actually a TFT instead of a plain old LCD, it has a much better image quality. It costs about the same.
The light grey area is the actual "display area" of the display, it measures about 4,2cm x 3,3cm. I ordered a resistive touchscreen to go with the display, but that's a story for another post.

Most phone display don't have easily solderable connectors or pins, but fully plastic flat ribbon cables containing the traces. These are said to be very hard to solder, beacause you can easily melt the plastic.

This display is a bit special in this regard: While it's connectors are little pads on a plastic circuit board style ribbon cable, I found it very easy to solder onto them. And I only used a plain old firestarter iron, so no fancy equipment needed.

What I did:
  1. Strip the ends of a ribbon cable (from a old IDE cable in this case) and tin the exposed wires
  2. Apply generous amounts of flux on the copper pads in the display
  3. Align your pre-tinned wires to the copper pads, and fix everything in place with scotch tape so it won't move while soldering
  4. Apply a tiny (really tiny!) amount of tin to the very tip of your soldering iron
  5. Push the tip of the iron onto a prealigned wire and push it onto the copper pad (don't use force here)
  6. Remove the iron as soon as the tin melts onto the copper pad (less than 1 second)
  7. Repeat step 4-6 for each of the remaining wires
Voila, easy connection, quite durable as well! I prepared a breakout board with pin header, and soldered that onto the other end of the cable.



I didn't want to apply too much force onto the pastic holing the copper pads, so I assembled the whole thing onto a piece of plastic for easy usage with the breadboard. Looks quite good.




 A lot of information and supposedly working code can be found on Christian's web 0.5 site (click the "Christian" image on the left). Thanks Christian!

I will test it tomorrow and see if I can get it working. Now I'm off playing Dungeon & Dragons Online, which is free to play now!

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