Fixing a broken Fossil charging dock cable
My other half somehow managed to break the USB connector from the cable of the Fossil Smartwatch Charging Dock.
I pushed back the transparent plastic and put some additional heat-shrinking around the connector so it was nice and snug:
It seemed that the cable itself only exposed two wires in the lead, which suggested that it could be easily fixed:
I couldn't find anyone with this same issue on the internet as I vaguely recollect the watch can be connected to USB for debugging purposes and USB data requires more than 2 wires...
I may have remembered that wrongly, but I figured I had to open up the connector to make sure that it is indeed just a two wire connection.
The connector itself was a bit of a pain to get into. After prying the silicon sleeve from the connector I could see just two connections: GND and VCC. So far, so good...
I had to use a pair of snips to get the transparent protective plastic off so I could get at the actual contacts:
Luckily, there's a pad marked "GND" on the tiny board, so I could easily figure out how to connect these two leads back on the PCB.
I added a little bit of heat-shrink tube to the exposed wire to make sure it could not short out with the red wire. Before soldering it back on, I had to push the wire through the original silicon sleeve. This was hard to do but I managed after snipping off the small part tube. Hard to explain what I mean but here's a little picture of the thing:
For good measure I ran two different sized pieces of white heat-shrink around the cable to shrink back after adding the original sleeve. Then, I soldered the wires back to the board.
I pushed back the sleeve, and applied heat to the heat-shrink tube I had put around the cable, like so:
As you can see, it's not the prettiest job. But it works fine -- and that's what's important! :-D
(I hope this information is of some use for others. As I couldn't find similar repair stories online, I imagined it would be useful to share this as it may not be obvious only two wires are needed and none of them are data.)
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