Is it typical for micro USB sockets to come loose in Fenix lights eventually leading to loss of continuity? This time it’s a Fenix BC35R with no solder at all on a micro USB socket retaining pins.
How did they connect it to the board if they did not use solder.
Probably only by the electrical pins, not the mounting pins of the housing.
Only data and power pins were soldered which eventually detached due to fatigue. There was some glue underneath the socket only. The retaining pins probably were meant to be soldered manually but they didn’t want to waste time on them while also increasing profits and demand for new lights sooner.
Don’t have even a single Fenix, but for other purposes I bought an assload of micro- and C sockets, Just In Case. Like, a 50pak each.
It’s always a recurring problem, either the connector detaching, or the contacts just wearing out.
The connector isn’t lost, it’s just loose and might have ripped off the traces.
Agree, they go bad so often that I carry around a dozen of each in the pants pocket.
Lol good one
I used to work in telephony, there was a model line of IP phones we sold that had the ethernet jacks surface-mounted. They would fail and rip the traces off the board. It was so common that we had to devise a repair anyway (or it would get expensive), so we mapped out the traces, bypassed them with magnet wire, and potted roughly half the board as the RMA process.
Anyway… yeah. Anything that gets plugged in/out should be through-hole mounted at least.
I’ll go on record and say that I find this extremely disappointing to hear. Extremely. Thank you for posting it.