Anyone with soldering experience: Can you help me fix my thumb drive?
Asked by
intro24 (
1434
)
April 10th, 2010
Help from anyone good with circuit boards and whatnot (any electrical engineers out there?) would be greatly appreciated.
Original question here. Progress I’ve made so far: I’ve managed to get power to the flash drive by attaching a new USB head. Surprisingly it worked but the drive still isn’t appearing on any computer. So now I’m not sure what the problem is.
Are the wires soldered onto the wrong pins? Is there some other thing I should be doing to get everything working again?
I don’t think any wires or leads are touching. And I’ve learned that the green and white wires are for data, and the red and black are for power if that helps anyone out. Pictures below:
Whole setup
USB head
Flash drive without case or USB head cover
Lit up while USB head is plugged in
If anyone could help it would save me so much work and time. So thank you in advanced.
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7 Answers
Sounds like the wires are soldered onto the wrong pins and if ya don’t think any wires or leads are touching you better check it all over so that you do know that they are none touching…
Oh dear lord
Please, just desolder the USB male end, and solder it onto the Flash drive so that it looks the same as it did, and you won’t have any problems, and no extra wires.
Good job soldering BTW
I hope that you didn’t accidentally wire it up backwards. I tend to have issues with thinking in “mirror-image” when doing such things. I mean, it’d be easy to accidentally solder the thing Black-green-white-red on one end and red-white-green-black on the other.
More importantly, I hope you didn’t overheat the drive when you soldered the end by the chip.
It looks from the photos of the flash drive itself that green & white might be shorted together by a blob of solder—or maybe the blobs indicate ‘cold solder joints’ which act as open circuits. Either way it’s getting power (red-black) but not data (green-white). Get a magnifier & recheck the solder joints. If necessary reheat – reflow the solder.
Of course, you might have fried something during soldering, in which case it’s flogging a dead horse.
Tried that, XOIIO. Not looking so good. I think I’m going to redo the project and maybe later just send in the drive somewhere to get all the other data back.
That is why I hate working that close to an IC chip. Basically, if the iron is there for more than about 1.6 seconds, you overheat something. Even soldering together a battery pack where you have to put the hot iron directly on the end of the battery cell is more forgiving.
@jerv True, battery packs aren’t very bad, but IC’s are hell.
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