Good evening everyone
Long story short, I tripped on my charging cable while my laptop was charging. Shame on me, should’ve been more careful. Having tried to bend the plug back into place with no luck, I declared the charging cable a lost cause. I decided to explore the cable that FW ships with their laptops.
Having immediately cut the charging plug off, here’s the decapitated and mangled plug:
And the rest of the cable, for reference:
Now, I stripped the charging cable into its component wires:
My initial guesses, based on the color coding of the wires, I assumed USB 3.0 wiring:
Those are some t h i c c power wires, even if stranded.
Another FW user, @Josh_Cook, suggested I take a deeper dive into the plug’s assembly. Here’s what the plug looks like after the rubber shell was removed:
Now, I wanted to see what the solder joint was encased in, so I took out some snips. Snipping a portion of the encasement reveals that this isn’t your typical hot glue, as the force required to shear was significantly higher and produced stress coloration where the snips have sheared.
I was kinda stuck - that being said, @Josh_Cook suggested I take a heatgun to the plug. And so I did. A mini PCB fell out along with the wires. Afterwards, I attempted to remove the shielding from the plug and ended up with this:
The USB plug itself is soldered to a 2x6 set of pads on the PCB, one on each side of the board. The PCB had some markings on it, one side with markings for power:
The other side had markings for USB data lines and some other signals (I could’ve sworn it was supposed to be SuperSpeed lines)
@Josh_Cook suggested that these also may be CC lines for USB-PD.
Lastly, I try to see if there’s a part number for these plug assemblies. Here’s the best I can do with my smartphone lens:
From inspection alone, I can make out the text CITA21113A on the plug itself. I could be wrong. I have also not found these connectors on major distributors like Digikey, Mouser, Newark, etc. These must be from a manufacturer catalogue instead.
Further work
While the plug itself is completely mangled, I’d like to salvage the cable. Please confirm the wiring arrangements I have uncovered here, and if you can, please suggest a suitable replacement USB-C plug assembly for repair. I know cables are relatively cheap in the grand scale of things, but it’d be a waste to throw out this one for conveniece sake.
Credits
@Josh_Cook for helping out with the exploration and interpretation
