Drive swap - new PCB idea

[tocksin]

I want to add a solid-state floppy drive, but my internal drive works fine.  I figure have the solid-state drive as an external drive.  But I want to be able to have the external drive be drive A:.  I understand I need to swap pins 19 and 20 on the yamaha chip to do that.  The chip is out of production, so I don't want to bend the pins and damage it.  I also don't want to cut the traces on the circuit board.  I'm not a fan of damaging old equipment.  So I had an alternate idea:

 

I unsolder the yamaha chip and replace it with a socket.  Then I make a PCB that has some holes where I can either put a jumper pins to have it long-term changed, or I could solder wires in there and run them to an external switch for short-term switching back and forth.  Here's the board that I came up with:

 

 

I figure you would need two of these.  The bottom one would have the inside headers going down into the socket and outside receptacles up to the second board.  The second board would have outside headers going down, and a socket in the inside going up.  You could solder right angle male headers in J3 and J4.  It's $5 for 10 boards from PCBWay.  It's $1 for two 40-pin DIP sockets, about $2 for 4 40-row male headers.  The female receptacles are optional - you could just solder the two boards together.  So it's less than $10 to save the computer and the chip from damage.  Unless I damage something desoldering the chip, but I just gotta be careful.  What do you guys think?  Do you think there would be any problems with any ST versions?  Is there anything else I should include?

[tocksin]

To follow up on this, the second problem is how to connect the external drive to the ST.  You either need to trash an old drive, or build a cable with the right floppy connector on the ST side which may be hard to find, or my solution:

 

Build an adapter PCB much like this one:  https://lotharek.pl/productdetail.php?id=112

 

So it's a HE10 34-pin floppy connector on the top side, and then it's just straight pins on the bottom.  You can solder individual pins into the PCB.  Although a jig might be needed to hold the pins straight in the right locations while soldering (might be able to use a second PCB for that).  Then you just need the 34-pin cable which usually comes with the floppy emulator.  Again, $5 for 10 boards from PCBWay.  And maybe $1 more for the pins and connector.  Any insights?

[snarkdluG]

You have some nice links in this thread.

 

I don't get it why you would need two boards stacked on top of each other?

[tocksin]

Ahh that's exactly what I was talking about.  Although, I'm not sure why there's a second board when you could just put the 34-pin header on the first board.  I guess it saves you from having to splice a usb cable for power.  But that could be made with a very small adapter board that could plug right on the drive.

 

You need a second board because the socket and chip have the same footprint.  Unless you use surface mount headers and socket.  But I don't know of a surface mount socket.  I guess I could search for one.  But the force needed to remove a chip from a socket could easily rip the surface mount socket off.  So a through-hole socket is needed, but there's interference between the top and bottom of the board.

[snarkdluG]

You do turned pin strips at the bottom and solder those in first. Then you solder in the socket above. Then you only need one board.

 

Like this: 

[tocksin]

Ah ya that makes more sense.  See, this is why I like to ask for input.  Everybody has good ideas.  It looks like this will take less room too.

[tocksin]

New proposed board.  Now only need one board.