Fixing my Gopro Hero3 camera! - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / repair

author: simmiv
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 24, 2015, 07:29:46 am
content: I'm using my Gopro Hero3 camera as a dashcam on my 4WD. Thus it's attached to a pole on the top of the car. Due to the fact that the Gopro battery only lasts a short time I have wired a USB charger and always connect to the USB connector on the Gopro camera when using it during driving. This gives me a whole day or as long as I need without depending on the battery charge!Once when I was connecting the usb cable it simply pushed the USB connector into the cameraAfter investigation and disassembly I saw that female usb connector on the camera had stripped itself off the board and fell into it. I was going to get another board, but they are hard to come by, so I ordered a replacement USB connector. The biggest challenge is how small all of this is i.e. using SMD components.Here you can see the connector on the camera as it should look normally.A normal board with a USB connector looks like this.My board however looked like this. The red square highlights two missing SMD Common Mode Line Filters!Here is a closeup of the stripped board.. The two missing parts are the D+ and D- SMD Common Mode Line Filter. They are extremely small!This is how small the SMD Common Mode Line Filters are. I found this one and it's broken but here it is pictured against a ruler using the mm scale.The connector had simply ripped itself off the board, although I'm pretty confident I hadn't applied any force at all!I gave up on the idea of trying to get new filters and reconnect the all the pins. I simply scraped off some of the copper and focused on attaching the ground and +5V line for charging.With that I managed to attach a new connector to the board. I also put a fair bit of strong clear epoxy glue to keep it in place. The connector works fine for charging, but all the other lines are not there! I can do everything I need without the USB connection. The photos I copy off the microSD card and any firmware updates can be done by copying the firmware to the microSD card as well. So another successful repair for less than $10!..I wonder if someone else would have been brave enough to re-attach all the copper traces to the USB connector!

author: pickle9000
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 24, 2015, 07:42:09 am
content: That's pretty good. It's certainly possible to reconnect but in that case I think you choice was a good one. Little effort and risk.Are there any settings inside the camera that you may need to adjust with the usb? I'm not that familiar with gopro.

author: simmiv
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 24, 2015, 07:50:28 am
content: Thankfully all the configuration is done via the buttons, so the only purpose of the USB connector is to charge the camera, or hook it up as a drive to the computer to copy files off or on.

author: Rerouter
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 24, 2015, 07:56:22 am
content: been there, done that about 50 times, on various things, including a tssop eeprom with all the pins snapped off, and only the tiny studs where they left the package exposed, and a number of usb connectors.how that currently is, it should be quite simple to reattach the data pins, just skip the common mode filter if you cannot reconnect it,when it gets as small as that, i tend to use a single stand of copper wire, pretinned, tack one end to the connector, then quickly tack the other end to what i can before the heat flows and liquefies the first end,attached is how i had to program a bloody tssop because i had no other way to connect to it at the time,

author: pickle9000
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 24, 2015, 07:57:03 am
content: So no issues, nice images of the board and connector.