AD2 30 pin connector durability

[Anthocyanina]

I've had my AD2 mostly with the 30 pin MTE flywire cable plugged in, but recently i got the impedance analyzer board, and have swapped betwen that and the flywires a few times. Getting the flywires plugged in all the way takes quite a bit of force, as does unplugging it, so I would like to know if this has been tested for numer of insertions or something that would give me an idea of how long this could last. I've been thinking about buying the other boards, like the curve tracer and audio ones, but not sure that's a good idea if swapping between them often would reduce the life of the connector and thus the life of the AD2 unit too fast. Is there a short extension cable for this that is male to female, perhaps 5cm or so to get the male pins needed for the boards and flywire so that gets worn down instead of the connector in the AD2?

Thank you!

[zygot]

Good question to think about. Connectors requiring high insertion force generally have low insertion cycle specification numbers; it's all about mechanical deign and stress. You can look at datasheets for similar connectors to get the answer. No doubt it will be disappointing, hopefully conservative. Products designed to fit the price range of the Analog Discovery don't usually consider such things as they don't provide lifetime warranties for parts and connectors with high insertion cycle specifications aren't cheap enough to use without altering the product price considerably.

One solution, if you are worried about it, would be to create a custom adapter to avoid plugging and unplugging thing onto the IO connector. I suppose that if the demand were there Digilent would offer their own solution to those willing to pay for it. Edited August 8, 2022 by zygot

[Anthocyanina]

hi @zygot, yeah, thank you, since i got the impedance analyzer board that's been on my mind, to make the adapter i asked about, perhaps not with cables but with a small pcb, still would like to know if they did some testing and found a number of insertions or some other metric that indicates expected durability :)

[JColvin]

Hi @Anthocyanina,

To the best of my knowledge, Digilent has not done any testing to find out the expected durability of the pins.

There is not currently an adapter that is just a straight female to male 2x15 pin connector either, mostly because as zygot suspected, we have not seen customer interest for it. I did do a bit of searching on Digikey (you of course can look wherever you prefer) and found some adapters that I believe are what you are looking for (digikey search results, though you might need to further filter the results to get longer post pins on the adapter).

Thanks,
JColvin

[Anthocyanina]

hi @JColvin! thanks, I'll take a look and see if one of those might save me the trouble of designing a pcb for this purpose. Would be nice as well to hear from anyone's experience with the AD2's connector, has it broken for everyone after too many insertions of the boards/flywires? any datapoints on this are welcome! thank you!