Feb 112013
 

A few months ago, the SD card socket on my original Raspberry Pi broke off to do an unfortunate smelting accident…No, not really. It was just dropped onto the SD card socket and snapped.

After some months of trying a few different fixes, I eventually gave up and bought a 512mb Raspberry Pi instead. But recently with some new ideas, I wanted another Pi to test out a few different things at once. Since I had a Pi lying around already, I decided to have another crack at fixing it.
I found a SD card socket that was almost a perfect fit for the Pi from Element 14 (SKU 2081361)

The old SD Card had already been de-soldered from my earlier attempts, so I just had to line up the pins and solder them down.

The end result came out like this –
SD Card Socket

There are 2 floating pins (on the left in the picture) that are used to detect whether the card is inserted, which are at the opposite end of where they should be, so I ended up just leaving them be, and on the Pi itself soldered the 2 pins that should have been connected there. This means that the Pi will always think that there’s a SD card inserted. Apart from those 2 pins, each and every other single pin lined up perfectly.

My soldering isn’t great so the SD card socket is a bit crooked, but the SD card still fits in beautifully in the case that I also purchased off Element 14.

After soldering, I inserted an SD card, and successfully booted up the Pi with the new SD card 😀

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Oct 092012
 

Hi Everyone,

Apologies to all as I have not had the time to write any new informative blog posts. I haven’t made any more progress on my Raspberry Pi either unfortunately as I have broken the SD card socket on my Pi. I am part of the way through fixing it up now though so hopefully I’ll be able to get it back up and running.

I have desoldered the old SD card socket, and have soldered on wires to all the pads except the 2 outer ones on each side. I got one of these SD Card readers ready to attach the wires onto. I don’t have pictures at the moment but I’ll get them up as soon as possible.
Hopefully this well let me get my projects up and running again so I can keep the Raspberry Pi goodies coming.

I’ll also do a better write up of the SD Card socket repair if it works.

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