I've found while working on older 486 and early Pentium laptops that a lot of them use 26 pin FFC cables - but 1.25mm ones. This includes laptops as old as the Tandy 1100FD all the way to my Toshiba 405CS. Almost all the replacement servo-based floppy nowadays are still 26 pin FFC - but they're 1.00mm spacing.
1) I got tired of trying to find these Female to Female 1.25mm to 1.00mm adapters, so I commissioned an adapter to be made and open sourced the design.
You need two (still available) parts from Mouser and can get three made from OSHPark or some other PCB place. Don't let the SMT stuff worry you for one side - I don't really do SMT well, but I was still able to assembly my three adapters just fine.
2) Also, some old laptops used the cable (male to male 1.25mm to 1.00mm) instead, and you can't fit an adapter in, so I had a FFC designer help me design a FFC cable. It's located here.
Note that with this, they're kind of expensive to get made, so if someone wants to do a community run of these, feel free. The cheapest place that I've found so far to do these is PCBWay. If someone else finds another place to get them done, let me know!
Both designs are open source, and all the files are on GitHub in the archive.
1) I got tired of trying to find these Female to Female 1.25mm to 1.00mm adapters, so I commissioned an adapter to be made and open sourced the design.
You need two (still available) parts from Mouser and can get three made from OSHPark or some other PCB place. Don't let the SMT stuff worry you for one side - I don't really do SMT well, but I was still able to assembly my three adapters just fine.
2) Also, some old laptops used the cable (male to male 1.25mm to 1.00mm) instead, and you can't fit an adapter in, so I had a FFC designer help me design a FFC cable. It's located here.
Note that with this, they're kind of expensive to get made, so if someone wants to do a community run of these, feel free. The cheapest place that I've found so far to do these is PCBWay. If someone else finds another place to get them done, let me know!
Both designs are open source, and all the files are on GitHub in the archive.
