pcbpcb-designsoldering
I have an LED strip that I need to solder to a flexible PCB (designed in Eagle).
What is the easiest way to solder the LED strip to the flexible PCB? Also, what can be changed in Eagle to make it easier to solder to the LED strip?
How do they accomplish the connection on the image below?
Provided your PCB already has the correct footprint, the best way to solder this is hot-air/paste or an oven.
Here's a picture of what the footprint for a similar connector (or the same, I'm not exactly sure) looks like on a board I designed recently.
I soldered these connectors onto the PCBs by paste and hot-air (you can check out a quick video on what hot-air looks like here). The important thing is getting all of the contact points molten at once, otherwise you'll be stuck with mechanical stresses on the joints (which is, obviously, undesirable) or bad connections.
An oven and solder-paste could also work quite similarly. A general method for that would be to apply paste, mount the connector, put the board in the oven and heat it until the joint forms.
In my opinion, if you are hand-soldering the board and have a decent soldering iron, you don't need thermals.
I regularly hand-solder on ground planes with stitched vias (RF boards) with no problems. Because these are RF ground planes, they don't have thermal relief for the vias.
FWIW - my old Weller soldering station isn't happy soldering large ground plane areas. On the other hand, my Metcal MX-500 with a sttc-113 tip works well. I was doing a bunch of soldering of RG-58 shield braid on ground plane earlier today with absolutely no problems.
Best Answer
The bottom image has the flexible part only extending half way in to the pad, and then soldered like a PCB jumper
This however does make it risk being levered off from the board, as there is generally nothing binding it on the bottom of the flex, only the narrow interface
There are other ways you can approach it to make the joint stronger, a simple one being to make the pads on the flex end closer to a crescent shape, this way the stress of flexing is spread out over a wider area,
Even better is to flip the ribbon over, and use the longer pads of what your joining to flow some solder between them, for the maximum surface area in common, makes rework more painful though.