Hello, the original ribbon was damaged and I need to insert a new one, in this model it is unfortunately soldered to the PCB. Can anyone help me choose a new ribbon (dimensions and type) for repair? There are 18 pins on this board but 16 pins go into the main board.
From the photos it seems at least two of the pins are bridged on the pcb. I’d suggest checking that out and maybe thinking about a nuclear option of gluing a 16-pin smd fpc connector to the touchpad pcb, then using a white flex with blue tabs from later dualsense revisions, provided the pin order is the same.
Do you know which specific socket would be good?
I recently repaired a destroyed trigger flex connector on the trigger assembly side by replacing the touchpad push-in connector on main controller pcb with an SMD 16-pin 0.5mm pitch fpc one I found in a local electronics store, but you can find those on AliExpress or Amazon. They are pretty generic and available. Just make sure the pinout matches when soldering. Can you post a photo of the dualsense and touchpad boards?
the total width of these touchpad pins is 12mm (18pins), I don’t know why but I can’t upload photos or links to photos
I don’t know if my calculation is right but this sounds like 0.7mm pitch then. You measured distance between the centers of the outer pins, right?
Is it the touchpad PCB something like this one? Stole this photo from PS5 Dualsense pin-out guide (BDM-020)
Yes, its the same one.I measured the length from 1 to 18 pins
I’ve been looking around if those ribbons are available, and sadly it’s quite unlikely, for some reason. I guess people just replace the PCB, which is wasteful, but definitely cost conscious. If it were me, and I am doing those repairs as a hobby, I’d power through and either glue down or make some attachment points on a ground plane somewhere to solder the connector’s side ground pads to, then solder all necessary pins either from the pads or from the test points, and just use a 16-pin ribbon, provided it’s 0.5mm pitch on both sides.
I even found some low insertion force connectors, similar to the kind Sony uses on Dualsense PCBs, but I’m not sure if they are perfectly matching. They surely take up less space than the ZIF ones, since they don’t have the additional padding on the sides where the flap hinges go, so they can be easier to maneuver around.
But that may be a lot of work. Perhaps it’s more beneficial to just replace the pcb with the one using a connector, if it’s compatible, and keep this one as a donor.