Saturday, September 17, 2011

GameBoy micro charge mod

I had a gameboy micro laying around with a dead battery and no charger so i decided to hack it open and replace the stupid proprietary charging jack with a mini usb jack. I would of rather used a micro usb jack but i didn't have one so a mini would have to do

Taking the micro apart wasn't too complicated. Man this thing is so small. Its amazing all that Nintendo has crammed into such a small package.

I tried to be very careful because the main board felt really thin and flimsy. It bent without much force so i treated it very delicately.

Once I had it apart I used a wire cutter and carefully cut the original jack apart piece by piece then I used my soldering iron to remove what was left of it. Then i cleaned up the pads and figured out the pin out to find the +5 and -5 for the charging circuit.


I used double sided foam tape to hold the mini usb jack in place and then reassembled the unit. Worked like a charm! I only connected the power to the jack not the data connections so it will only be able to charge but that OK with me.