This picture shows the rough-in before I made it look nice. I soldered it in by soldering the old mounting holes directly to the casing of the connector. Seems sturdy enough. I might put a piece of foam in there to help hold it in place, take any excess pressure off the PCB.
I used this connector from Amazon, and soldered in my own 5.1k resistor to make it compatible with USB C PD chargers. I hate devices that leave that resistor out. Very annoying.
It's crazy, this thing was made in 2012. USB C wasn't even ratified until 2014. The first name brand Android didn't have it until ~~2016~~ 2015. And here I've drug it into the future. Cool stuff!
Screen off:
Screen on:
Edit: fixed date.
Hey! I just saw this post linked on another one in the steam deck comm. I was wondering, how difficult was this to do, and was there any guide you followed? Ive been wanting to do this myself but the most Ive done so far is replace the charger port on the 3ds with another oem 3ds charger
Howdy! Difficulty is relative unfortunately.
I didn't follow a guide, I just kind of did it. Checked the rating of the original charger, 5 volts. I knew that USBC would default to 5 volts with the right resistance in the sense pins, looked it up. Went on Amazon, found a female USBC, with resistor pads broken out, that looked like it might fit the space. Bought it on a gamble, it fit.
Removed the one connector with great difficulty. Used multimeter to find which pad on the board was for ground, so the other must be 5v. Double checked with some googling. The rest is in the OP I think ๐ค
If you've done some soldering before, and are more proficient than a complete beginner, I think you'll be fine. This is maybe moderate, maybe. But not advanced.
If you wanna give it a go I'll be glad to answer any questions you've got
I love fixing stuff. It's almost a curse because it's hard to justify replacing things with new versions if I keep endlessly fixing the old lol
Thats fair, I like repairing things as well! For the most part I've strayed from soldering because I feel like the possibility of me screwing something up is high. I can proficiently take Something apart, replace a part and put it back together though! :P
I know some basic soldering but Im not sure if I know enough. Like, I've never used flux before, and I have a basic cheapo iron I spent maybe $40 on. I'm also completely lost on the electrical side of things. I have a multimeter, but I couldn't tell you what the difference between wattage, voltage, current and amperage is.
Is there any good resources you'd know of to point me to in terms of getting down the same kind of skillset you think would be required to do this? Like, any videos, articles, books, or just basic online searches I should do to gain the knowledge?
I appreciate you taking the time :)
Howdy! Apologies for the delay, been a busy week and I'm VERY good at procrastinating lol.
That's great! A desire to repair stuff is really all you need. Literally everything else you can just learn along the way.
Fun fact about soldering, you've almost certainly used flux before. Most solder these days is rosin-core, which means it has flux in the middle. It's aggressive flux so you don't want to leave it on the parts when your done, scrub it off with an old toothbrush an some isopropyl alcohol.
As for the iron? Which one do you have exactly? The iron is the place where most people go wrong, a bad iron will make your life very hard. But cheap irons can be good, it just depends. I HIGHLY recommend the PINECIL, it's cheap but better than many irons 4 times it's price. Load it up with the latest release of IronOS and you've got an iron worth its weight in gold.
As for learning the electrical side of things, I'm afraid I can't offer much in the way of training or guides to figure it out. You just kind of gotta.. play with stuff. Do some studying, sure, watch some videos, get a handle on basic concepts.
But honestly? Go to your local recycler, and grab some free broken stuff. You can't hurt it more. Maybe you can fix it? If not, maybe you just learn how it works by taking it apart. Use broken circuit boards to practice soldering, remove and replace components , get good at controlling where the solder goes, etc. Watch some videos on it, but hands on practice is what you need.
I'll throw some general info at you. "the difference between wattage, voltage, current and amperage". You can think of electricity kind of like a water pipe. Voltage is the pressure of the water, how hard it's being pushed. Current, also know as amperage, is the flow of water, how fast it's moving through the pipe. Now that sounds like pressure but it's different, related, but different. We'll come back to that. Finally is resistance, which is like squeezing the sides of a rubber hose, you're making it harder for the water to get through. With water, squeezing the pipe creates some heat at the point where you squeezed, but hardly any at all. But with electricity, resistance creates heat. Everything has a resistance, usually it's very small, but always present, and frequently becomes an issue you need to consider. There's also inductance and capacitance, even reactance, but that's getting too deep for this write-up.
Back to Wattage. Wattage is just the combination voltage and current. It is the total power delivered. You calculate it by multiplying voltage and current. The cool part is, you can trade one for the other, and as long as your circuit or device is designed to handle it, the result is the same. The same amount of power is delivered. You can have a small pipe, with very high pressure, blasting water out the end in a stream that shoots tens of feet, but if you tried to fill a bucket it might take 1 minute to fill 1 gallon. But you could also have a big 2 inch pipe, with water barely trickling out of it, and it also takes 1 minute to fill 1 gallon. In both cases the "wattage" was the same, 1 gallon per minute of water.
If you think too hard about the water analogy it starts to break down, at least for me. The problem is that current isn't really pushed along like water is, it's moreso... drawn, by the device using it. It's complicated, sorry.
Let's switch to real units instead. Say you've got a device that needs 1000 watts to run, it can accept any voltage, but the wires you have can only carry 10 amps before they get too hot and melt, because all wires have an internal resistance that limits them. To find the lowest voltage we can use, we just divide the wattage by the current. 1000 divided by 10 is 100. So if we provide 100 volts, the device will draw 10 amps of current, and the total power used will be 1000 watts.
If we want a safety margin, we just increase the voltage to 120. 1000 divided by 120 is 8.33. The wires will only have to carry 8.33 amps to get the same 1000 watts of power at the other side.
This is how the electrical grid works. From some quick googling, the overhead powerlines on a residential street can carry around 1000 amps of current. But, how can that be? That power line feeds hundreds of houses, and each house has 100 or 200 amp service, so that's easily thousands or tens of thousands of amps! The lines would melt!
Well, again some quick googling shows that the overhead lines are anywhere from 12 to 34 thousand volts. Your house only uses 240/120volts, here in the USA. The voltage is lowered through the use of transformers(how they work is out of the scope here) from 34,000 to 240 volts.
So let's say you're using your houses full 200 amps of service all at once. At 240 volts, that's 48,000 watts! 48,000 divided by 34,000 is only 1.4 amps. The actual load your house is putting on the power lines is only 1.4 amps. Barely anything. If every house was using the same 200 amps all at once, and the overhead lines can carry 1000 amps, it could support 714 houses. But of course not everyone is doing that, so there's some overprovisioning going on, at least I think there is, don't quote me haha.
Anywho, I think that's about enough for now. Questions?
No questions! That was extremely thorough, and I'm going to save this so I can come back to it in the future. I appreciate that a lot!!
On the Pinecil, Ive wanted one for a while, but with the current US admin, pine has been put in a tough spot. They werent shipping here for a while, and at time of writing the Pinecil would cost the same amount as the shipping. I actually have a Pinetime and its a neat little product!
Again though I appreciate you taking the time. I'll have to research where around me might have recycling up for grabs to practice on.
Glad I could help!
I've got a spare pinecil, new in box, I can send it to you for whatever I paid plus shipping to you, if you're interested.
I think I'm okay for now, my budget this month is a bit tight. I appreciate the offer though! :)