[HN Gopher] Repairing a tiny ribbon cable inside a 28 year old I...
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Repairing a tiny ribbon cable inside a 28 year old IBM ThinkPad
701c
Author : jgrahamc
Score : 45 points
Date : 2023-03-11 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.jgc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.jgc.org)
| somat wrote:
| A deserved "Well done" to the author, a good end to a tricky job.
| I wonder if it is possible to solder the two halves of a flex
| circuit directly together? That is, is it possible without the
| junction wires?
|
| Scrape the top of one, the bottom of the other, apply solder pads
| to both sides then align the two and reflow the solder.
| megous wrote:
| That's how these are sometimes soldered to the PC board.
|
| Eg. https://pine64.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/PinePhone-
| USB-...
| myself248 wrote:
| Theoretically yes, but it's harder to control the heat for the
| duration you need to do that. The flex substrate is pretty
| melty.
|
| I would try it with a shovel tip and a whole lot of spares to
| get the technique down, but if I only had one shot, I think I'd
| go with the author's technique, one wire at a time. Perhaps
| with less gap between the ends, though.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| The gap was to make up for the amount of ribbon I'd damaged
| along the way. I didn't want to shorten it too much!
| neuralRiot wrote:
| I've done this many times and in smaller ribbons with
| narrower traces, this is a FPCB the substrate is kapton and
| it should whitstand soldering temps pretty well the trickiest
| ones are FFCs (the white ones)
| myself248 wrote:
| Oh good call, yes most of my experience is with the white
| ones. Clearly I need to tinker more! :)
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Ah. Good to know. I actually attempted something like that
| before this particular fix and it didn't go well. Hence I
| "gave up" and did it the "hard" way by hand.
| causality0 wrote:
| _Amazingly that ugly thing has no short circuits and there 's a
| connection on all six tracks. Clearly, that's very fragile so I
| mixed up some epoxy glue and covered the whole thing up._
|
| If you're going to do something similar I would suggest not
| relying on just epoxy. Consider adding something like a strip of
| denim as backing support.
| whythre wrote:
| Impressive work at such a small scale. I used to work with small
| ribbon cables frequently, but it was usually some scraping and
| reshaping to fix deformities- nothing as audacious as this
| grafting!
| jtwaleson wrote:
| Awesome work, happy to see you're putting them to good use ;)
| dm319 wrote:
| Anyone know if it's possible to run a modern distribution on
| this? I had a bit of difficulty running full-fledged Linux on a
| Thinkpad X60 due to it being 32bit. Linux mint debian edition
| came to my rescue, but I wonder if you'd need linux from scratch
| or something like that.
| cpach wrote:
| NetBSD should work according to their docs:
|
| https://www.netbsd.org/ports/i386/hardware.html
| jtwaleson wrote:
| It's a 486, you will probably be able to run a lightweight
| Linux distro but it will be sloooooow.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I don't think most distros compile for i486, minimum is i686
| (not too familiar with the jargon though, before my time).
| Even the kernel itself was going to trash i486 support
| entirely. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-i486-Linux-
| Possible-Drop
| guessbest wrote:
| They'll have to run it with a 2.2 era kernel. Everything
| after that ran dog slow on these machines.
| cosgrove wrote:
| Not quite what you asked, but there was someone who did a
| "brain transplant" recently:
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ibm-thinkpad-701c-receives...
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Debian still has 32bit x86 binaries:
| https://www.debian.org/distrib/
| [deleted]
| guestbest wrote:
| There is a big slowdown from win98se to win2k, it is the same
| on Linux with 2.2 kernel and the 2.4. You would best using an
| older operating system, shutting down most of not all services
| and connecting through a very strict proxy
| luke2m wrote:
| I run MX Linux on my T60.
| opencl wrote:
| The kernel itself is still fine on 486s and there are a couple
| of distros that should still technically work. Obviously
| nothing 'full fledged' is going to fit in the RAM on the thing
| or run at any sort of reasonable speed.
|
| Gentoo is probably the easiest mainstream distro to get running
| just because you can fiddle with all the compiler flags and
| kernel options. A few people have also put together small
| custom images with modern kernels for this class of hardware.
| haunter wrote:
| Xwoaf-rebuild-4.0 http://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html
|
| One floppy image, full GUI and tons of applications through
| busybox. Here is a video showing the full distro
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo
|
| On the other hand it's not "modern", 2.2.26 kernel is from 1999
| [deleted]
| CTOSian wrote:
| It may be possible to use conductive paint instead of soldering,
| of course this depends if there is allowance to keep the damaged
| part flat. I did this on a keyboard membrane, had some damage
| caused by water. You need to apply the paint slowly via a
| toothpick, then kapton tape on the top.
| archarios wrote:
| I have an OP-1 that could use similar love on the ribbon cable.
| pretty nervous to try it though..
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(page generated 2023-03-11 23:00 UTC)