[HN Gopher] Repairing a tiny ribbon cable inside a 28 year old I... ___________________________________________________________________ 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.. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-03-11 23:00 UTC)