Improving front USB reliability

The connectors tend to get flakey after a lot of cycles.

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John Larkin Highland Technology Inc

Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

Flip it over and resolder all the connections. Never mind if the connection looks good. Just hit everything with a soldering iron.

Shine a flashlight through the PCB. The one in the photo is phenolic, which cracks easily. Look for breaks in the copper traces.

Sometimes the crimps on the wires are bad. Pull on each wire, one at a time. If the wire falls out of the crimp, there's the problem.

Just fix it. No need to redesign it.

Pull on all the crimp pins.

If its loose, its broke !

He could have a motherboard that's about to fail. If the elecrolytics are going high ESR, the noise on the power rails can cause problems.

I have a different problem. We put together 3 new quad core PCs. If you use the front connectors ESD freezes the PC.

I'm not surprised. Ribbon cable for USB 2.0? How long is the cable? I wouldn't connect any USB 2.0 device to that.

Just guessing, Did you check the connector pinouts actually match the mainboards headers?

It's about half a meter, although mine has tinfoil-like shiled and a plastic jacket around it. The tinfoil isn't connected to ground, though.

Does it work OK with USB 1.1 devices (keyboards and mice)? If it does, and gets flaky with 2.0 devices, I would bet on the cable not being apropos for USB 2.0.

I can no longer test it because I installed a better and shorter cable with proper shielding and it's working perfectly!