I got a 701cs from a customer over a year ago to repair, but it was a total basket case with numerous faults related to the main battery exploding and leaking all over the board. The customer abandoned the machine, so after it sitting in pieces off to the side of my bench staring back at me that long, I decided to try doing something with it, which is when I found this project.
I’ve mostly figured out what I’m going to do for the screen and motherboard, but I’m completely baffled on the butterfly keyboard.
The problem I’m having is with the two keyboard connectors, through some extensive research, I believe it’s called an “interstitial flat flex cable” with a 0.3mm pin pitch. But I cannot find this connector anywhere. I’ve ordered a few sample connectors, and they always end up being microscopic and nowhere near the correct size. After 10 or so failures, I gave up and removed the ones from the old main board, and then ran into another problem, the PCB mounting pins are also not a standard size. I’ve bought several of those FFC/FPC adapter boards from Ali Express, but none of those are the correct pin pitch. It seems to be something like 0.55mm.
I was wanting to know if anyone has a source for those weird keyboard cable connectors, and potentially a generic adapter board that they can sit on? I really want to have to avoid soldering wires directly to the flex cables and permanently alter them. Currently I have a jank setup using an 80 conductor IDE ribbon cable, which just happens to match the pin pitch on the IBM connector. I’d prefer not to use this method, because it takes up too much space. The janky adapter works well enough with a TeensyDuino that I can get half the keyboard working at a time, but it’s not consistently reliable.