In a perfect world, I could buy a bunch of the keyboard/mouse adapter cables and just use regular devices. It is not easy to come by though, so I contemplated making a small dongle to allow pairing of bluetooth devices.
I searched quite a bit and have been unable to find this connector from any of the manufacturers, so perhaps it was truly a custom designed connector style. I was also unable to find it used in any other products, I tried to look at other old products by Ricoh that may have used it including the Thinkpad 220, but no luck.
As an alternative it would have been nice to do the straight PCB method that can be done with USB, however the contacts are recessed on the PC110 so contact would not be made to a flat PCB. What I contemplated was to use a spring contact on a PCB, along with an MCU. This is my proof of concept, mechanically it fits and holds nicely, and the contacts line up and make some contact so I will proceed to investigating what MCU to use and produce a PCB. As a fallback I will put a footprint for a standard ps/2 DIN connector so I could at least use a standard mouse. Not pretty but it will work.
I have done some work with Bluetooth/BLE a while back on another project, but this is new to me. What I need is a chip I can use to pair a bluetooth keyboard/mouse to, and then drive the ps/2 signals. Driving the ps/2 is the easy part, pairing to a mouse/keyboard is uncharted territory for me.
Proof of concept PCB dongle:
AVX 8 Position 1mm pitch Spring Compression Contact
The Original Cable
PC110 | PS/2 | DESC |
1 | Not Connected | |
2 | 1 | Data |
3 | 2 | Reserved |
4 | 4 | +5V |
5 | 6 | Reserved |
6 | 5 | Clock |
7 | 3 | Ground |
8 | 3 | Ground |