Micro SD Card Adapter

I recently bought GeauxRobot Raspberry Pi Premium Low-profile MicroSD (TF) to SD Card Adapter and received it yesterday.

After writing Raspian to the 4GB micro SD card, I stuck it in the adaptor, stuck the adaptor into the Testpi, then plugged it in. Pi didn't boot and I cycled the power before using the stock adaptor, which worked.

I did a continuity test on the parts of the board that I was able to and found nothing conclusive. After the initial Raspbian setup, I decided to try again, with no new results. I then decide to pop the hood up enough, and eventually one of the solder joints for the hood broke, and enabled me to access the micro SD contact pins. At that point as well, I lost a piece for the click-lock retention/ejection, but I wasn't paying too much attention, since my focus was trying to diagnose the adaptor.

I'm not sure what I did, but I took it to my soldering iron to remove the hood by melting the solder of the other joint for the hood, and then ran another continuity test with the pins itself, which is when I found that one of the pins wasn't properly soldered - probably a bad reflow. I checked the rest of the pins (which turned out fine) before double checking the bad pin again. I took the adaptor back to my solder station and heated the joint a couple times to make sure the solder reflowed well enough.

I went back to my room to stick the micro SD card into it to find that the hood didn't want to stay on, and so I had to keep pressure on the hood as I did a quick boot test. Once confirmed, I took the micro SD card out of the adaptor and soldered the hood back on. Unfortunately, the initial tinkering of the hood (where it popped the solder joint) also shaved off the retention clips on that side of the micro SD card holder (thin metal, thin plastic, and some force does not mix well), and at that point I was at a loss of how to fix it.

After a minute or two of looking at the adaptor, I saw the weird solder joint that the hood makes contact with when a card isn't present (the joints aren't connected to anything), which could just be a stabilization or positioning thing, I don't know for sure. Anyway, I had saw the thing before and found it slightly weird when it didn't connect to it via continuity test, but I found that to be the only way to hold that corner of the hood down; I went back out to the soldering iron to solder the hood to the solder joint. I accidentally soldered the contact arm along with it, but the micro SD card fits and reads just fine, so I left it.

It was nice that I was able to fix a "dead" unit, since it's a very simple design - with nothing more than contact points and some PCB traces - and I didn't want to try a different brand (along with the fact that I was unable to return it once I opened the hood). It also saved me the disappointment of a DOA product looming around until I forgot about it.

It was definitely one of the more interesting turnouts for a potentially bad product.