Raspberry Pi Forums

My Micro USB port broke off in an accident, and I do not think it is going to be able to be soldered back on, as some of the pads have been torn off. I was wondering if I could power it in a Different fashion. Now there are many posts about powering via USB or GPIO, however I do not want to do this as it will bypass the poly fuse. What I want to know is if there is a way to power by soldering a USB cable directly to the Pi. I have a Raspberry Pi 2 and have not been able to find any ways to do this for the newer model.

You should be able to easily find somewhere to solder a ground connection, eg one of the 8 large mounting pins of the 2 USB socket pairs. For the positive you should be able to solder to the correct end of the polyfuse. I cannot tell you which end is which as my RPi2 is currently encased in a non-transparent case. However on a B+ the input end of the polyfuse appears to be the end closest to the edge of the board where the micro-SD card goes.

Which of the 8 mounting pins would I solder my ground to?

You can solder the +5V wire to the points marked PP1 or PP2 and ground wire to PP3, PP$, PP5 or PP6. That will be the same as if the power has been supplied through the micro USB.

This is for the Raspberry Pi 2 right? There have been many posts about the B+ so I just want to make sure.

8ByteRemmargorp wrote:Which of the 8 mounting pins would I solder my ground to?

NOT to any of the 8 data pins! You can solder a ground wire to any of the large port shroud hold down tabs on the bottom of the board. There are 4 on each USB port. 2 on the RJ45 jack etc.

The PP1 & PP2 (5V) and PP3 (ground) and most of the other PPx test pads are the same on B+ and 2B models.

Thanks, I got it working now. I soldered to the PP2 and PP3 pins and it's working great again! Thanks for your input.