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Soldering For Non-Solderers?
DanielMarkham asks: "A few months ago I bought a 4GB USB drive from jmtek Online. I really liked the drive -- heck, 4 GBs were awesome! But over time, using it in my tablet PC, the connectors started loosening up between the USB plug and the IC. Eventually, the part that plugs into the computer came loose from the rest of the drive. So, now I've got six-hundred bucks worth of useless plastic. I don't know anything about circuit board repair, so I'm in a bit of a fix. As I understand it, the 90-day return period has timed-out, and there's not much I can do in the way of a refund. But all of my data is still on there, I just need some way to re-connect the USB plug to the circuit board. I guess that would involve soldering? Do you guys have any idea how I could get the USB drive fixed without spending a lot of time or money?"
Look for Ham clubs, Robot clubs, heck, even your local LUG could have somebody competant to help you out.
Good Luck!
Stop the world; I need to get off.
But how are you going to crack that drive open to solder it? It looks to me, from my own drive, that if you pull the case apart, the drive comes out on one side and the circuitry on the other, causing even more damage. ???
You should just have someone solder it for you. It would probably cost like $50 or so to take it to a shop and have them resolder the traces. Seriously. Don't even think about trying it as your first job because you will likely end up getting too much solder everywhere and the part will become useless, and a repair all the more costly (if possible). Find some geeky friends that mod X-Boxen and have them look at it. I bet you know someone that would do it for a bag of grass or a night of drinking or something along those lines. Just don't try to do it yourself, especially if you have never soldered before in your life. Its like asking "I've never tried it before, but how do I rebuild my tranny?" Not really recommended without proper tools, knowledge and experience.
zosxavius photography
Don't think that you're going to use a $14.99 30-watt iron from Radio Shack to do it, either.
USBDrive 4GB Weatherproof
Professional USBDrive 4GB Weatherproof
It would appear that both devices come with a 1-year warranty, so once you get your data off, I would contact them and tell them that it broke. (Assuming that it wasn't negligence that caused it anyway)
Get that thing replaced man, $600? Jeez. I'd want that thing fixed.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Call me cynical, but isn't the previous post spam?
2 05.0.html
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http://www.jobs-junction.com/smf/index.php/topic,
Looks like it.
.
Find a VCR/TV repair shop in your area (yes, they do exist). I bet they'd do it for you either cheap or free.
DiscDividers tabbed plastic CD dividers: divider cards f
or to the authorized service centre, or, gasp, try talking to the company. Perhaps they can help?
Slashdot, why are you running away?
I guess that if you lived just down the road you could come over and I'd teach you how to rework the solder joints ... you MIGHT want to clue the rest of us into what part of the planet you currently occupy!
You can check the phone book for electronics repair, retail, or electronics repair, industrial. Another place that may well be prepared to do this sort of work is a local two-way radio repair shop . The industrial folks and the two-way radio shops might well be better prepared to repair your device, but you may have to pay quite a bit. Be sure you bring all the parts.
What ever you do, don't try liquid metal. I HATE cleaning up after someone tries using that stuff. Ugh.
Once repaired, you might also consider a careful application of epoxy to strengthen the bond between the connector and the board. That is, after all, why the connector came off ... solder is pretty much useless by itself when it comes to holding something in place.
Soldering, by itself, isn't all that difficult. It only requires the proper tools and practice ... though I don't believe you really want to get that deep into things.
You MIGHT find a ham radio operator that knows what to do, and has the tools to do so, but that's probably a stretch (in the past, ham radio operators were more technically oriented, today it's so much easier to buy the equipment rather than make it. Thus, fewer hams are equipped, much less experienced in micro miniature repair). And yes ... I'm a ham as well, I speak from my experiences.
I guess so, it was removed.
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If the wire just tacks onto the surface, expose about 1/8 inch of bare wire, tin it (that is, using the soldering iron, wet the wire thoroughly with solder) then press it onto the board with the soldering iron. Quickly press the wire in place with the end of a screwdriver and remove the iron. Hold the wire with the screwdriver tip for a few seconds until the solder hardens.
If the wire passes through a hole in the board, you need to clean the solder out of the hole. To do this, place the iron to the board and use a soldering wick (an absorbant copper mesh, probably available at Radio Shack) to soak up the excess solder. Then you can strip the insulation off the end of the wire (about 1/8 inch again), place the bare wire through the hole, apply solder and remove the iron. If the wire is stranded, you may want to twist the strands together a bit to keep them together. Trim off any excess wire sticking through the other side above the solder.
If you can't find soldering wick, you can heat the wire by placing the iron against it and gently poke the wire through the hole, melting the solder as you go. Finally, apply some solder to the board to secure the wire. This requires three hands and is recommended only as a last resort.
The thing you must be careful about is not overheating the board. If the iron is held in contact with it too long (more than a few seconds), other components may become unsoldered or the varnish may melt, producing nasty fumes, or the copper traces may separate from the board. If the last of these happens, you may be able to salvage it by replacing the failed traces with 30-gauge wire using techniques described in the first paragraph. This is unnecessary if you are careful though.
If you use rosin core or flux core solder, you should use a q-tip soaked in paint thinner to clean the newly soldered connection after it has cooled. This will prevent corrosion.
Finally, to keep this from happening again, it is best to secure the wire so that it does not flex near the solder joint, where it is brittle and prone to breaking. Nylon zip ties are good for this and should be placed around a structural component of your hardware and preferably not around the board itself.
If you don't want to risk ruining your good hardware right away, you may want to practice by soldering wires to an old token ring card or something.
As for the soldering iron, a small iron of less than 50 Watts is best for this kind of work. Do not use a soldering gun because they are bulkier and more difficult to control and certainly do not use the 300 watt model designed for copper roofing.
Good luck.
Unknown host pong.
I dunno, but around here, I'd just get out the yellow pages and start phoning around. But hey, now we've got the net and /., why do any work ourselves, eh?
So much for old-fashioned American ingenuity and initiative, but I digress.
Words to men, as air to birds.
A lot of manufacturers of expensive electronics will allow you to pay something like 50 bucks plus shipping to repair minor damage like that. If you're not feeling up to soldering, that's a good route to go. Plus they generally warranty their work. The one drawback I've found to this route is that manufacturers generally restore things to their original condition, which is the condition that wasn't strong enough to last anyway.
Personally, I'd say this is the perfect time to learn to solder. It's really not that difficult. The only real problem is that it can be scary. Disassemble the unit, and take a look at the size of the connection with the board. If the connections are similar in size on the inside as the USB plug is on the outside, by soldering standards that's pretty big and a pretty good thing to start with.
You can get someone who knows what they're doing to give you some tips, but all you really need is google, a 15 dollar soldering iron, 5 dollars worth of soft lead solder, and a little guts.
The ______ Agenda
Just a note that for $600 you could have bought 3 4G iPod minis and had some redundancy and far better reliability. Plus you could listen to music on them. ;-)
BGet an arc welder, some gloves and a blast helmet. After that, it will practically repair itself. Trust me on this.
You could attempt it yourself, but it's a gamble if your inexperienced.
Your local University or Community College has a Electrical/Electronics Engneering or Technician program with lots of students who will solder stuff for at low cost and might even help teach you how to do it. I've repaired quite a few devices that people brought into the school lab. Call up a professer (or department head if no individual instructor's numbers are public); they will probably be more then willing to give a student some work with real world troubleshooting and repair.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
http://www.aaroncake.net/electronics/solder.htm
you may want to consider the thumb drive as a transport not a backup from now on. I killed a few drives myself.
Hello? Earth to Captain Obvious ... Earth to Captain Obvious ... Can you hear us?
Of course it is spam; have you forgotten all the GMale-spam that Google let lose via its astroturfs before the actual launch? Now they are pushing their outsourcing-services.
Your best bet as far as wiring goes is to cut apart an extra USB cable. The wires are color coded to correspond to pin numbers.
Referencing your orininal connector and getting pin numbers simply connect the following pins to wire colors:
1-red
2-white
3-green
4-black
(ignore the shielding on the USB cable or connect it to ground (pin 4))
Install Ubuntu in Android
Yeah, this is one of the most common problems with devices that have plugs, and you can usually fix it with soldering. Generally, your solder joints won't last as long as the original bad joints did in the first place, so this "repair" won't be particularly permanent unless you do something like mount the connector to the chassis and connect it to the PCB with flexible wires instead. Soldering is not too hard, but for something that costs $600, you might not want this to be your first attempt.
I did a laughably sloppy job of this with my MP3 player a year or so ago and posted the steps and pictures . You probably don't want to be this sloppy.
Maybe they can fix it for you for a small fee, and keep your data.
...but you didn't say that you tried to use it again. Did you try it? If not, do it.
My 128MB OTi drive's USB plug is loose, and so is the plastic shell. But the darn thing still works, and it's sitting in my pocket right now.
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well, I'll be civil, though I shouldn't. As a holiday gift from my father I was given a 128mb flash player made by Jmtek that according to the packaging worked with a mac. At the time I hadn't had a pc in a while, so it was the mac or nothing. Well, needless to say it didn't work, at all. After 6 months of waiting for Jmtek to respond to my emails and online support tickets, I sent an email threatening to post terrible reviews of their product on every review site I could find on the internet. I was emailed within two hours, and the first solution they came up with was an RMA. Sent the unit back, and they called me as soon as it got to them. The solution to the problem was that even though it claimed compatibility on the package, it wasn't. Now bear in mind, this is 7 months after I was given the drive. They offered to upgrade me to a mac compatible version, but it was $45 more, or they could credit my father's credit card he used to purchase the drive. Not being one to return gifts, they finally agreed with me that 7 months of my time was worth $45, and I got the upgraded model for free. Let me tell you, this thing is a kludge. Within an hour of owning it all the painted labeling had worn off. It has an SD slot, but if you put an SD card into it while it's plugged into USB, it just becomes an SD card adapter rather than an SD card adapter and a USB mass storage (for the flash built in) After a month of cumbersome usage, I bought my iPod, and put the Jmtek in a drawer. Ignored it for two months, and when I took it out of the drawer again, the LCD was cracked. From sitting. In an unused drawer. Emailed Jmtek again, and the model's discontinued, no replacement for me. I for one can say from experience that not buying from them is a wise move.
Elecraft has the best tutorial I have ever used. I thought I knew how to solder until I read their guide. They will have you wanting to buy a fancy soldering station in no time :)
Try the tutorial on this page. (I'm not linking to the pdf directly as they are not a huge company so don't kill their bandwidth)
The ratio of people to cake is too big
All you need really is a heat gun. A heat gun should soften the SMD connections without meltimg th ABS plactic, allowing you to reseat the connections. Maby you'll need some extra solder paste.
Here is a nice(expensive) SMD rework Kit here
There are cheaper kits if you dig a little deeper.
Just wanted to add that some credit cards extend product warrantees. So if you used a credit card to buy this item you may want to investigate whether your credit offers any added coverage. Ironically, this is something I always forget about but for some reson thought of when reading this post.
You could probably use someone with good path (trace) repair /rework skills. Good ones are like surgeons, and are rarely paid much, so an offer of say $60-$100 would probably get the job done to perfection (better than new). You'll find these people wherever circuitry is being mfgr'd/tested -find the plant and meet them outside during a smoke brake/ popular lunch break spot or something. SMT path repair & rework equipment is really expensive but it gets the job done right without all the esd damage and radioshaftiness that others are suggesting you gamble with.
If your data wasn't important and $600 is nothing to you, then i'd say buy some used smt soldering equipment from ebay, use some extra cards with smt chips and connectors to practice soldering on, have your test work checked by someone who knows what good circuit soldering is, buy the 16mb version of your drive and practice on it, then cross your fingers and try it for real.
Firefox &
1. I have a motherboard with a bad keyboard connector. I want to swap on off another bad board and figure I can use it to practice.
2. I search for hardware and tutorials on the internet, finding similar links provided in these responses.
3. You Ask Slashdot about soldering.
4. I find where my company is gearing up to do chip level testing on failed ICB's.
I think I may pursue this further.
Someone hates these cans.
I'm not kidding. This is a perfect opportunity to learn a useful skill. Take the $50 you'd spend to get your unit repaired and spend the money on a used soldering iron and a shiny new tip instead.
s /Soldered.pdf
Then (here's the important part) practice on stuff that you won't miss before you try repairing the drive. Raid your neighbor's garbage for old electronics and spend a few hours removing components, replacing them, tinning wires, etc.
Two nice online introductions to soldering (both originally produced by Nasa) are located here:
http://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/elab/soldering.htm
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~phylabs/bsc/PDFFile
Or, if you really don't want to learn to solder, talk to your neighbors. See if there's a ham radio club in your neighborhood. Hunt for a radio/television repair shop. Drop by the electronics shop at your local community college. Or, chat up the guy selling refurbished electronics at the nearest swap-meet.
you should have a manufacturers warranty that extends beyond the 90 day return policy of the outlet. I have a USB drive that fried 8 or 10 months after I bought it and the manufacturer replaced it no problem - even got my data off the old one and sent it to me on a CD.
or else!
I'm great at soldering...even surface mount!
Send it to me, I'll fix it and keep it!^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsend it right back to you!
In my lab, we use some 5-metre USB extension leads, which have an active repeater at the far end. One of these stopped working, and I took it apart, and checked the cable for continuity. All the wires in the cable were good, so the problem must have been something to do with the repeater circuitry.
A colleage decided to salvage the cable by rewiring it as a passive extension cable, and hoping that the signal degradation wouldn't be a problem. He tested it on his USB flash drive, and somehow managed to fry the drive.
1. Have Firefox
i nfo.php?id=278
2. Install FastDic (see link below)
3. Set up your favourite online dictionaries
4. Now you can Ctrl-click, Alt-click or even Shift-click on the word in question and query different dictionaries which open in a different tab.
5. Glee!!!
Link to FastDic: https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/more
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
I managed to scrape the insulation off the back of the circuit board and stick a bit of paper-clip on using blue-tac. I was astounded when I managed to boot off it and it ran long enough for me to get my data off it.
Next time I fit a new drive, I'll do it sober!
Subjects like this make me really miss Heathkit.
Most of you kids are too young to remember them as they were in their prime. They used to sell kits that allowed you to build almost anything electronic and you learned as you built. They had the very best documentation available anywhere for anything. Every manual started with a brief course in soldering. They also had some excellent training courses including.....soldering.
If this were the 1980's I would recommend that you purchase a kit from them. You would then learn to solder and be able to go on to fix your drive, and maybe go on to build one of their excellent amateur radio sets or TV's or robots.
Sigh
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
I'll leave it to others to advise you on whether to do it yourself, or how to learn, or how hard or easy it is. I'll just add one thing:
If you _do_ decide to learn to solder, use some form of eye protection, every time. I never took eye protection while soldering seriously, until the day I met a one-eyed technician who would have been a two-eyed technician had he worn safety glasses.
Seriously. Safety glasses are cheap. Wearing them is no hassle. Just do it.
You might want to check out the manufacturer Vs shipper warranty. I'm not sure if 90 days is standard, but I know a lot of stuff I buy tends to have a 1yr+ manufacturer warranty, while the company you buy it from might only accept RMA returns for the first 90 days...
Well, soldering itself isn't too difficult to comprehend:
- don't be hung over, or have drank too much coffee. Your hands need to be steady.
- when working on small circuits, a magnifying glass is helpful. There's things called 'helping hands' which will hold the components to be soldered in the right position, and also have a positionable magnifying glass with a light.
- clean all oxidation off of the metal surfaces to be soldered, using light duty sandpaper, steel wool, or a chemical compound called "rosin". Make sure you use rosin acceptable for electronics, plumbing rosin is often acidic and will damage electronic components.
- use solder of appropriate guage to what you're working on. Probably you want really tiny solder.
- physically attach the two metal surfaces, with a vise or what have you. Make you you leave enough room to get the iron in, and still be able to see what's going on.
- clean the tip of the iron, heat it up, then apply a small amount of solder to the iron itself. This is known as 'tinning' the iron.
- apply the solder on one side of the metal surfaces, and put the soldering iron on the other. The idea here is that the metal surfaces have to be hot enough to keep the solder from 'balling up' and running off the board, or otherwise creating a 'cold solder joint'. it shouldn't take more than ten seconds from the tip you place the soldering iron on the metal joint to when the solder on the other side starts to melt. If it takes longer, use a higher power soldering iron
- don't use too much solder or too little. It's hard to explain this in words, just look at other soldering joint done by professionals and you should see what it looks like
- apply heat just long enough to completely melt and spread the solder around the joint. Leaving the iron on too long can overheat components.
- if you don't apply heat long enough, or if you bump the joint while its cooling, you may create acold solder joint. This will have a pitted or scaley appearance, sometimes greyish. You want something smooth and shiney.
One of the things I've learned though experience, is the importance of the proper heating power. Some places will tell you 'use a low wattage iron' to avoid overheating. Well, this is bullshit. If you use an iron that is too wimpy, like those cheap $5 radio shack ones, the joint isn't heated up quickly enough, but the heat has time travel away to the components while you're sitting there with the iron on the joint for 30 seconds wondering when the solder is going to melt. The best irons are the ones with adjustable settings and a trigger, a 'soldering gun'.
- remember when soldering that while solder provides some physical strength, in electronics that is not its main purpose. Any wires that are under strain should not depend entirely on solder to keep them together. Use some sort of strain relief when called for.
I hope this has been helpful.
I had a drive do the exact same thing, and it was fixable. Just find someone that knows how to solder (see all the other posts here).
:-)
BUT, once you've had it fixed, spend $5 on a USB extension cable (male on one end, female on the other) and plug your drive in through that instead of directly into the computer. This saves the drive from getting bumped around while it's plugged in, and weakening the solder again. The drive moves, but the connector doesn't, and the solder gets all of that force. The connector simply allows the drive some flexibility and takes away a lot of the stress on the connector.
I've done this with a second drive of mine, and have never had problems with the connector.
Experiments must be reproducible; they should all fail in the same way.
If you take care of it, it will last you many years of trouble free service.
The most important part of the soldering iron is the tip, so buy quality tips, and most importantly the right shaped tip for the job. I get my Hakko tips from ElectroWiseHSV which carries the best selection. Some of their specialty stuff is pricey, but you can't find it anywhere else.
The other thing that's nice about Hakko is that you can use them with the newer lead-free solder. The newer Hakko irons are designed for the new tin-based solder (ok to use lead-based solder as well) which melts at considerably higher temperatures.
Cheap solder irons and guns can't melt this stuff, because they were designed to melt lead-based solder.
Lastly, if you want to get good results always keep the tip CLEAN. I cannot stress this enough. This will also help extend the life of your tips. Some of the specialty tips can be quite expensive, like over a hundred bucks!
Every guy should know how to solder properly. It's right up there with knowing how start a campfire or jump-starting a car.
Then you can buy a new one for $50.00...
Although still, solid-state drives are MUCH less likely to get damaged by temperature changes (and have a much wider operating temperature range) than HDDs.
:)
Their shock resistance is probably an order of magnitude (maybe a few orders of magnitude.) higher than that of an HDD, too.
Personally, I've ditched the USB thumb drives. I now go with a keychain SD card reader (SanDisk MobileMate SD+) and SD cards. So far I just have a single 512M SD card, but I can always add more, and the SD cards are more durable than the USB connector. Plus they work in my Treo.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
After finding all of the parts, etching out a really crappy board (thanks, Radio Shack), I had a lot of tiny wires and some soldering to do. Of course, I never soldered anything in my life, so I thought it would be fun.
I had solder, a butane soldering iron and no flux, of course, since I didn't know what that was. After I soldered some big 128k sram chips to my crappy etched out PCB and even drew some traces with solder I was ready for the wires.
I'm sure you've heard of the metaphor regarding trying to herd kittens in a wheelbarrow, right? Imagine those kittens are made of molten tin solder. I learned after a particularly bad solder burn that I did indeed taste like chicken when I was cooked.
Six hours later I had a big hunk of crap stuck to the back of my calculator as a daughter board. There wasn't enough room in the case for the three big chips, so I had to cut a hole in the back. I just had to try burning away the plastic with the soldering iron first until I nearly passed out from the fumes, and found that a jigsaw just might work better.
After I put power to it, of course it didn't work, so I checked things out and found some solder had made it underneath the chips. What a pain in the ass. I took it apart, cleaned out the solder, and put everything back together. That was maybe six more hours. I was getting good at this. I turned it on and then it booted up straight away. So I'm thinking, "Great! All done!" I even was able to store 128k strings without trouble.
After showing some friends at school that I could put greyscale tetris on the device and play without any trouble whilst thumbing my nose at the two suckers that shelled out the extra cash for a GX, it fell out of my bag and onto the street. I figured everything should be ok, right? I turned it on and got a black screen. I then thought that maybe I screwed up the memory somehow, so I put in two batteries backwards for a second to clear the memory. Blue smoke started to pour out the back. I whacked the batteries out of the back and then waited until I got home to work on it some more. When I got home, I removed everything and put the old 32k chip back in. I also found that I had learned the hard way about cold solder joints. It worked fine, except that calculator could drain its batteries from fresh to empty in 15 minutes. It blew out the reverse polarity protection circuit.
I had this calculator during finals with a bag of batteries at my desk. You could imagine the looks I got when I smashed the batteries out the back and put new ones in four times during the same exam. I was used to doing this, so it was weird turning to others and saying, "what?"
Ah, good times, good times. Of course the next one I did was much, much cleaner. A professional job. It was stolen. I found an HP49G some time later with 2+ megs of storage on it, and at a better price point than burning hands.
Elecraft is heir to the throne of old-school Heathkit. They do good stuff.
http://www.epemag.wimborne.co.uk/solderfaq.htm
http://www.busyweather.com/