MBF

5/31/20

Made some minor progress in working with an engineer on doing the keyboard and track pad circuitry.  Not done yet, but still hacking away!

Got an older macbook 2008 polycarbonate top case.  Wired up the keyboard to usb and was able to get the keys working but not the trackpad...

This week the headers for the usb extensions arrived.  I went with common 2.54mm pitch double stack header pins.  I put 90 degree pins on the board and 2x 4 wire jumpers with 4 pin connectors carry the signal to the ports for the external USB.  I also sourced a flexible cable for the monitor.  This was a decent hurdle as the original cable was ffc which is flat, but doesn't work well for the laptop hinge.  After a few wrong orders, I found the cable that worked for this project came from an inspiron 7000 series.  It's an eDP 30 pin to ffc 30 pin 0.5mm pitch.  I have a hunch that I can get an older macbook polycarbonate keyboard/trackpad to work so I'm ordering that.  Another hackaday member, RRPrime has a good trackpad hack that might be usable for this project, and would be fun to keep as much original as possible.  I understood about half of what he wrote o.O