I have bought a handful of 40 pin IDC connectors for a flat cable. I wanted to use them on the cheap, colorful, no-datasheet 40-pin flat cable bought a long ago from Ebay that I had lying around. The idea was to use it to extend the Raspberry 40-pin header with a cable to tinker on a shield that has it's interesting parts on the bottom - sandwiched between itself and the Pi. The result was not pleasant:

The 40-pin IDC cable is shorter than the connector meant for it, a fail of cheap Ebay products.

So I went to the local store (heat wave still ongoing) and bought a proper AWG28 40-pin cable. Now the connector fits the cable:

The 40-pin IDC connector fits the proper AWG28 cable.

The sad part is that I had zillions of such cables from the old IDE HDDs. Yet stock of such things suffers greatly when moving. Now I just needed a single one and had to go through all these unnecessary trouble to obtain one to get it to work. Hopefully I am not missing something terribly obvious and it will in fact work for the Raspberry. Stay tuned.

This is a 98th post of #100daystooffload.