Ribbon Cables & Heatsinks

[ElRay70K70H]

I've started planning my Frankenstein's Combo Amp (replacing the guts of an old Crate Two-Tone with a pi-Stomp) and realized I need to spread things out a bit. I saw the section on top-mounting/using a ribbon-cable with the LCD, but can I do the same with the main board the the GPIO connector on the RPi4? The idea is to mount the RPi4 at the back of the case to be able to access the ports.

Also, in the default stacked configuration, is there space for any heatsinks on the RPi4 board?

[Randall (Admin)]

You mean attach your Rpi4 via a 2x20 ribbon cable instead of directly to the hat hacker?  Yeah, I imagine that should work fine.  Main concern would be voltage drop, if the cable is long, for the 5v if power is supplied from the pi-Stomp board barrel connector.  Probably fine, but the pi is picky about getting it's 5v and many ribbon cables use super thin 28 AWG wire.  Noise perhaps too because all those GPIO's become little broadcasting antennae.  On the positive side you're getting that noisy pi away from the audio circuits, so... 

In the pi-Stomp Core 4 layer sandwich, there is about 7mm between the top of the 3A+ SoC and the hat hacker.  So the kits I sell come with 2 small 3.5mm tall heat sinks for the SoC and RAM.

[ElRay70K70H]

Part of the idea was to separate the components, better cooling, etc.  Given that I'd be replacing the guts of a combo-amp, everything would be in a metal case. I wasn't thinking of picking-up stray signals from outside.

Maybe I could wire-up a GPIO extender with heavier wires?