Broken uSD (Micro SD) Slot

#1

I broke the Micro SD slot. The cover was loose anyway and one of the prongs snapped off with it. If I hold the card to the pins it boots.

How difficult would it be to solder it back on with an iron? Can the board be booted from a USB stick? I have to wait for delivery of the soldering kit but will be sure to come back with success / fail update.

Either I could brick it or fix it at this point. Learning a lot about the fragility of the SD card in terms of actual pi cases that’s really what broke it.

#2

I think you’d need a hot-air station for that.
It depends on what the connection is that needs to be made.
If you’ve never soldered then your probably going to mess it up big time. Ask somebody who knows what he’s doing.
If you bridge some pins it will short and burn your device.
You can use it with eMMC without an sd-card. I would opt for that and leave the sd horor for what it is.

Could it be you’re not very careful with your board? I’ve got +20 sbc’s and never broke one like that.
But the sd from the RockPi does stick out a lot, so I’l give you the benefit of the doubt :slight_smile:

1 Like
#3

Because of all the connectors are exposed, and also the uSD card slot has no special pins to hold it in PCB.

After plugging in the SD card, a part of it will stick out. If toped against something hard, will damage the card slot.

You can contact with our agent and tell them that your Pi 4 's uSD card slot was damaged by yourself. They should deal with it properly.

#4

Hey awesome how do I contact the agent? I did some soldering a long time ago a little goes a long way.

#5

If you have SPI flash(3.3V, SOP8 footprint, size larger than 32Mbit), you can solder one, and flash the bootloader in SPI flash. Then you can boot with USB.

#6

The ROCK PI 4 where to buy, and please take the initiative to contact the corresponding seller.