The link worked fine for me: Mirror

Thanks to both of you. Our base here in Afghanistan has some really funky firewall settings and they block a lot of sites, some of which are obvious some we have no idea why. -Lee

I love this site; I always learn something new. :D TexasPyro, thanks for the warning. A quick Google search proved I am inviting soldering tip disaster for anyone following my tip grinding advice! :oops: :oops: :oops:

That may not be a good idea. A lot of soldering iron tips are copper or iron alloy cores that are plated with a magic material. If you break the plating, then the tip pretty much gets dissolved by the solder. Yes it will erode the tip very quickly, been there done that. It would probably be best to just buy the finest tip you can find. If you must grind down your tip, use it quickly before it starts pitting from the the molten solder.

Soldering directly to L5 can be done… I pulled the white pad off a camera yesterday. The schematic shows both data lines (green & white) passing through L5 (Inductor or coil used to filter noise.) I could not identify the data line traces so I soldered directly to the coil pin. After trial-and-error I found the upper, left-hand corner (relative to the orientation of the photo.) to work for the white data line. I did the trace tonight (I also pulled off the D- pad with a cheapy soldering iron last year). You're very right, the upper left is the D- and the lower left is D+. Soldering to the right side would bypass L5. Thanks for finding that connection! :-) Thankfully here in my shop I have access to a real nice Pace soldering station.

Shoot me for resurrecting an old thread... Regarding the term 'NC': 20+ years in electronic engineering behind me: NC varies according to each manufacturers intentions. I worked for Unitrodes Applications support group, as a technician, they usually had 'NC' meaning leave this pin floating, with a few datasheets saying (in the pin descriptions) to tie this pin to ground. For some other manufacturers devices, this pin was once used to load OTP EPROM data at the factory, but should not be used after that. Sometimes the pin must be tied somewhere, but otherwise has no purpose (can't call it data, nor Vcc or ground, but it has to have a name...); often, the 'NC' pin was connected internally to a substrate (Unitrode learned why this was a bad idea), but the die was not allowed to have a potential on the substrate, so instead of calling it Vss and potentially fooling designers into thinking this pin needed a bias, they simply wanted you to tie it to ground. In the end, you must read the device datasheet or call the manufacturers tech support/applications support groups. One blown chip, after all the work you folks put into this hacking sure seems silly.

not connected, no contact,

If it says NC it means No Connection. As in "there is Nothing Connected to it". Also as in "make No Connection to it". Any other interpretation is just plain WRONG. "Those who disagree are cordially invited to go pound sand up their alien probe hole."

RESURRECTION OF OLD THREAD. If you have a problem with it, that sucks. Was the schematic drawn in AutoCAD?