I've always loved the ingenuity of the Thinkpad 701C "butterfly" keyboard. Back in the day (1995) I had a serious case of laptop envy when my boss persuaded the company to buy him one.
Anyway, moving forward I now have a project to reuse a 701 keyboard in a home made laptop project. I will be getting a scrap keyboard in the next few days to take apart but for now I'm looking at the FPC connections that come from my good keyboard. They are of a type that doesn't seem to be available now, staggered row with what looks to be a 0.625 inter pin spacing. The ZIF connectors on the IBM board have no maker marks on them and so far the closest I can find are the long obsolete 52396 series from MOLEX.
http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1672056.pdfThe thing is that these are not the same as the ZIF connectors on the IBM board. The Molex are a lever type and the IBM ones use the pull out side tabs. My question is, has anyone seen a staggered row FPC like this before? Does anyone know of another connector manufacturer that makes connectors of this type other than MOLEX?
