Anybody have the USB port on their arduino go bad?

I've got intermittent failures that looks like a bad USB cable. On three different cables. One thing I've noticed is that there is a lot of wobble in the connector. I think 9 months of having the cable come around to the front of the printer has messed it up.
Is there something I can do to fix this? Replace the port? Shim the side with a bit of paper?

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9 Comments

  1. I've experienced some low end PCs (like Dells), especially laptops, to not have enough juice on the USB ports to keep a good data connection. You might want to try a different computer. Macs are usually higher on the USB specs (to charge iPads faster maybe), try a Mac or a desktop PC if you have access to one.

  2. The computer was a high end XEON server back in its day. It's worked well for about 9 months.

    I used a bit of failed print to shim the jack for now. So far so good. I think a new USB port is whats in order.

  3. I was using one of those. Mostly to keep certain curious 2 year olds from sneaking around where she doesn't belong and stepping on the cable and causing bad things to happen.

    I've traced it to the arduino port. The plastic shim seems to work. I guess I'd printed a fix for USB issues. Who'd have thought.

  4. I unsoldered the jack and hard-wired a USB cable to the arduino yesterday. So far so good.

    A plastic shim had worked for about 10 hours of printing. But yesterday it stopped about 2 hours into an 8 hour print. That pissed me off.

    So I tore the printer apart. It's now been re-soldered, water cooled, temperature monitored and fiber-optic-ed. 

    The hacked off cable end really wobbles in the removed port. I guess they just wore badly after 9 months of wobbling.

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