[forgotacc240419]

How was the usb c installation? Feels a bit beyond my soldering skills. I mainly use a zip but I put together a very slim mini to c cable for my Clip+ that does the job.

Don't suppose you could tell me the name of the part they use for the headphone jack? I can find loads that look almost right but never the exact model

[namuol]

It was pretty intense, but mostly because I’m clumsy and didn’t plan anything.

There’s not a lot of room on the board, so I soldered 0402 resistors directly to the pins on the port to allow it to work with modern PD chargers, and I had to expose a few traces so I could jump the pins since it didn’t align with the mini usb pads. Fortunately I was able to solder its feet to the main structural pads and it’s a good firm connection.

I bought an assorted usb-c port kit from Amazon with something like 10 varieties and chose the port that best fit onto the board. I needed to bend the legs a bit but it worked.

I used a digital microscope and fine solder tips. There’s no “easy” way to do this that I’m aware of, especially since I chose low melt solder to avoid melting the port’s plastic, which meant the jumper wire conducted enough heat to desolder the other connection if I didn’t work quickly!

This experience had me wondering if I could design a little thin adapter pcb to make the process less error prone, but I’ve never done anything like that before…

What’s wrong with your audio port? To find a replacement you might want to get some cheap calipers and measure a bunch of stuff to compare with components on digikey/mouser/aliexpress.

Or you may just be able to repair it instead of replacing it. Could be it just needs its pins reflowed to the board if you haven’t tried that yet. I hope you can fix it - good luck!

[forgotacc240419]

Oh yeah that's way beyond me! I might do a mini to micro mod first, that seems relatively quite easy

The common headphone jack issue is that one of the pins comes loose very easily but that's a very simple fix of adding some extra solder. Beyond that the audio port gradually gets looser to the point headphones will very easily fall out; I think if you just never remove the headphones this will be much less likely to happen.

The main failures I've seen on eBay are: - dead battery (these are often in amazing condition otherwise because they were bought and hardly used) - loose audio jack (simple solder fix but may have the looseness issues) - broken membrane buttons (probably not very fixable?) - faded screen (probably has lots of other issues but generally usable)