I cannot find IDC ribbon cable connectors in any of the search categories. The Ribbon Cable “assemblies” come up but not the individual connectors.
Are these what you are looking for?
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The classic 0.1" pitch IDC connectors for .050" pitch ribbon cable (and the like…) are classified under Rectangular Connectors, Free Hanging and Panel Mount..
They don’t really float to the top of the default result order for the family, but emerge quickly if one takes the time to specify a few key parameters, e.g. pitch, number of rows, etc.
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That’s not very intuitive. I would think that the "Search feature would narrow down the focus more accurately. It would seem that with the category for “ribbon cable assemblies” at the top of the index list, this would be a natural place to find the connectors and accessories to make the ribbon cable assemblies. The category could be labeled “ribbon cable assemblies and components.”
The notion of an “intuitive” presentation is unfortunately quite subjective.
The goal of the product taxonomy is to group items having similar functions, features, and dimensions of variability, in order to facilitate the presentation of those defining characteristics in a normalized parametric fashion.
Though this does result in something of a learning curve and a requirement for mental engagement on the users’ part, it is a superior paradigm for design and engineering purposes.
The DigiKey “search” function is best understood as a text-based filtering tool. The general idea is that it returns all product listings for which all of the supplied (space-separated) search terms appear somewhere in the indexed data for a given part.
Put differently, the idea is that it returns all that it is asked for and nothing else; the user is in charge and does the thinking, while the “search” function quietly obeys. Folks shopping for consumer goods may prefer to trade control for convenience, but most serious designers/engineers are quite insistent on using their tools, rather than being used by them.
In an effort to replicate your issue, I did a search for “IDC Ribbon Cable”, the category they’re found in shows up second on top of the list.
The reason they show up is because the type of cable is listed associated with the connectors in the search parametrics.
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I suppose I was a bit incorrect in my expectation that if I entered the “IDC cable” together as a search term The search results would respond with something more focused than a list of items that have either one or both terms somewhere in their descriptions?
So it seems that I would get the same results if entering a search with IDC and another search with cable separately?
Is there a way to search where both terms are used as a statement together? Like entering the search term in quotes or parentheses i.e. “IDC cable” or “IDC cable connector”
It was very frustrating and I’m not new to this, I’ve been using DigiKey for parts for over 30 years.
When I entered “IDC cable connector” into the search or various versions of those terms I NEVER saw a response that got me into a group of items that resembled what I was looking for. In some cases, the result were some parts groups with a quantity of 2 items that met those criteria, but never saw anything resembling what I was looking for. After about an hour of searching, I eventually had to resort to entering a part number that I had for a similar connector just to get me into the ballpark and poke around from there.
There’s got to be a better way.
I found I had much better results and found things quicker using the paper catalog because the items with similar functions were grouped together on neighboring pages and if I didn’t have an exact description using terminology in the text, I could quickly see what was available and adjust my design requirements by scanning the pages for pictures and descriptions listed.
Maybe that’s just me… But I don’t think so.
Thanks for the responses.
Alex