Comment by namuol
It was pretty intense, but mostly because I’m clumsy and didn’t plan anything.
There’s not a lot of room on the board, so I soldered 0402 resistors directly to the pins on the port to allow it to work with modern PD chargers, and I had to expose a few traces so I could jump the pins since it didn’t align with the mini usb pads. Fortunately I was able to solder its feet to the main structural pads and it’s a good firm connection.
I bought an assorted usb-c port kit from Amazon with something like 10 varieties and chose the port that best fit onto the board. I needed to bend the legs a bit but it worked.
I used a digital microscope and fine solder tips. There’s no “easy” way to do this that I’m aware of, especially since I chose low melt solder to avoid melting the port’s plastic, which meant the jumper wire conducted enough heat to desolder the other connection if I didn’t work quickly!
This experience had me wondering if I could design a little thin adapter pcb to make the process less error prone, but I’ve never done anything like that before…
What’s wrong with your audio port? To find a replacement you might want to get some cheap calipers and measure a bunch of stuff to compare with components on digikey/mouser/aliexpress.
Or you may just be able to repair it instead of replacing it. Could be it just needs its pins reflowed to the board if you haven’t tried that yet. I hope you can fix it - good luck!
Oh yeah that's way beyond me! I might do a mini to micro mod first, that seems relatively quite easy
The common headphone jack issue is that one of the pins comes loose very easily but that's a very simple fix of adding some extra solder. Beyond that the audio port gradually gets looser to the point headphones will very easily fall out; I think if you just never remove the headphones this will be much less likely to happen.
The main failures I've seen on eBay are: - dead battery (these are often in amazing condition otherwise because they were bought and hardly used) - loose audio jack (simple solder fix but may have the looseness issues) - broken membrane buttons (probably not very fixable?) - faded screen (probably has lots of other issues but generally usable)