I've had my Raspberry Pi Model A for quite a time and it's got quite a workout over the years and unfortunately the USB port became really mangled. The pins inside somehow got bent out of shape and none of the devices plugged in would work. At first I thought this spelled the end for this Model A RPi, however after a bit of thinking I decided that I could just desolder the USB port and replace it with a USB type B cable.

This is what the port looked like...Nothing is going to work in that!


After a bit of coercion with the soldering iron, the USB port came out. It wasn't a clean extraction but I got it out. At the same time I stripped and tinned the USB cable end.


Then it was just a matter of soldering in the cable where the old USB port was.




The reason I chose to use a USB type B cable is so that it can plug into my USB hub directly. Essentially it means that instead of 1 USB port my RPi now had 7!


So does this work? Indeed it does! Here's a photo of the RPi compiling a new kernel. So far I've not had any issues with this set up. WiFi works, USB storage works, keyboard works, seems very functional overall.


-i