​Invictor Electronic Communications

I was asked to repair a very bent usb pen. No problem I thought. It did not involve any soldering as it appeared just bent. The plug end was good but where its contact pins met the circuit board there was a gap. Simple, just bend the pins to make contact with the circuit board and all would be well. However, they still did not touch the circuit board. It was too small even wearing magnifying glasses.

The other option was to bend the tip at a 30 degree angle so the pins were closer to the circuit board. Nope still not long enough. So I ground the end of the board down to make it closer to the pins. Ah now close enough to solder the plugs pins to the board. Four soldered perfectly then it was time for number five. Tragedy, the contact just lifted straight of the board as soon as heat hit it. There was nothing to solder back to as the board is a multilayer board and the contact must be somewhere where you can’t get access to it. It turns out that the contact that lifted off was a data bus so without that the pen would never work. I soldered the last 3 pins and put it into my test rig. Alas dead as a dodo.

 

No other backups? No. So don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If your data is valuable to you make more than one backup. I actually have eight and have had to use one of them myself as one of my PC’s lost loads of files for no reason. Of course there are professional companies out there that can lift the memory chip of the board and mount it into another one but that’s £250ish. A conventional hard drive is £499. An extra £30 pen? Of course, It’s worth it. Make sure you buy a quality pen and not cheap unbranded like this one was.