6-Conductor Ribbon Cable with IDC Connectors 12

Jargon buster

Plain-language definitions for the technical terms used above.

AVR

AVR is a family of 8-bit microcontrollers (made by Microchip, formerly Atmel) used in many classic Arduino-style boards such as the Uno and Nano. They are widely supported but older, which can be a limit for memory- or speed-intensive tasks.

Headers

Rows of connector contacts on a fixed pitch (commonly 2.54 mm) used to link a board to a breadboard, jumper wires, or another board. They come as male pin headers and female socket headers; when a module ships with pre-soldered headers it can be used straight away, whereas bare pads require soldering the pins yourself.

IDC connector

An IDC (insulation-displacement contact) connector clamps onto a flat ribbon cable to carry many signals at once in a neat, keyed bundle. When a product uses an IDC connector it can be joined to a matching ribbon cable without wiring each signal separately, and the keying helps prevent reversed connections.

ISP

In electronics, ISP usually means In-System Programming, a way to load firmware onto a microcontroller while it stays on the board (often via an ICSP header), or an Image Signal Processor, hardware that turns raw camera sensor data into usable images and offloads the main CPU. The surrounding context shows which meaning applies.

SPI

A fast serial communication bus often used for displays, memory cards, and sensors. It matters because SPI devices need specific pins for clock and data, plus a separate chip-select line for each device.