So a few weeks ago, ok, March, my friend says to me "Dr. Dan, can you fix a broken USB stick?" , as he shows me the pieces. "Well, I can try to get the data" I skeptically reply. First, I had to identify what was broken. At first glance it looks like a mess to the naked eye, but under a microscope it was much worse. There's actually a component or two missing, this lowered my hopes of being able to recover the data. At any rate, I was determined to at least give it the college try as they say. First, we had to identify the connections that would be necessary to fix. It was actualy pretty straightforward. On a USB connector, the outside contacts are the power, and the inside two are the com lines. The power connections were easy to spot on the board, but there were traces missing for the comm lines. Soldering straight to the micro was the only hope of success.
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| My thumb isn't that big... |
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Next we soldered a couple more #30 wires to the power connections...
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| Power connections, easy. |
Finally, we were ready for a try at getting the data off of it..
Hacked up an old USB cable I had laying around and just twisted the wires onto the flying leads from the USB stick. After plugging it in to my old computer(just in case something bad happened) it popped right up and I was able to get the data from it.
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