So…the USB jack on the Fio V3 along with both Serial1 and Serial for development is a huge plus. Love the board! However, I must have put a physical strain on the jack, because the SMD connections separated. It’s now busticated and there appears to be no easy way to fix it.
I’m acquiring a couple of new boards and I was thinking of putting a small dab of nail polish in the area of the SMD connections on the new boards to give them some mechanical strength and wondered if anyone has any thoughts on this. The SMD connections are very small and I suspect others may experience this same failure if not very careful.
Not that this helps you, but this sort of thing is why I hate using SMD connectors. When I’m forced to use them, I generally modify the manufacturer-recommended footprints to reduce the chance of pads being ripped off. This can even include adding a bunch of vias to “tie” the pads to the bottom layer of the PCB. I learned this the hard way when a batch of boards I designed started failing in the field. Admittedly this was a high vibration environment, but humans pulling on the cables was also to blame. This pic shows what I mean:
