Saturday 19 March 2011

embedded PC Broken USB ports

This was a batch of embedded PC's with broken USB ports. Rough treatment had seen the supports snap off making the whole thing very wobbly.


The only key here is heat, lots of it.

This isn't the most interesting fix but its worth dwelling on some of the fundamentals of this kind of repair.

1. Patience, never rush the de solder, pulling on the component while applying the heat could have disastrous effects, pulling out the through holes or lifting the track.

2.Choose the right weapon, see that big ground plane there ! and what about the multi layers, thats going to take a lot of heat, if your iron cant cope it will never realy get hot enough and ..... see point 1 ! Experience has taught me you should only attempt the de solder if you have the right iron to hand.

I solder sucked the middle four pins and used a HUGE iron to get the four outer pins molten and pulled it, solder braid or solder sucking would just not get the holes clear so pulling was the only option, now I have just warned against pulling but you just have to get a feel for it and hold back until its hot enough.

On this board you can see the four mounting posts have all snapped off, this actually made the de solder easier as that metal shell would have pulled a lot of heat away. In fact I had another (I should have taken more pics) where the shell was fine (contacts inside had been mangled) but I purposely broke the four tags before attempting the de solder.

For this one I hadn't got the spare connectors yet (the connector was fine, just the mounting tabs were faulty) so improvised by making straps out of tinned copper wire and re used it.


A nice fix but for the others I used brand new connectors, only about £1 each.

The PC's were AMD Geode based which I had not come across before. They are AMD's competitor to Intel Atom.

1 comment:

  1. If we have any broken USB ports in our embedded PC, this blog give us the idea on how to fix it. Many of us don’t know how to manage our anger for any bugs or broken in our computer. We need to patiently wait and fix any broken parts of our embedded PC. The author of this blog gives a tip for the users on how to fix or repair this. We do not need to be rush by de soldering any part, to get it up the component or parts to be fix whilst applying the heat could have terrible effects or even pulling out the through holes or lifting the track. We don’t need to do that but instead we should try to de solder the parts to fix if we have the right iron to hand. Thanks for giving me some information on how to do de soldering. It’s enough for me to learn some techniques here.

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