There’s been a dead Blue Yeti mic hanging around the house for almost a year now. It was left in the foyer, so I would see it just about every day and think, briefly, “maybe I should look at that,” before moving on. This week I actually stopped and took a closer look and saw that it had a mangled USB port, which powers this mic. It uses a USB type B female, and I could pick them up pretty easily, so I tried to fix it.Luckily someone else better than me, namely Borderline OCD, already went through this process and then shared his learnings as a tutorial on Youtube, and for that I’m most grateful.
I was able to remove the PCB board from the casing and then all I had to do was desolder the old USB B port and replace it with a new one. Sounds easy enough, but soldering is not my forte so it took a few hours to get the old port off cleanly. I’ve already learned from past mistakes that rushing it and forcing things breaks traces and lifts pads. Something I learned this time around is that my cheap soldering iron is not cutting it. It literally went hot and cold on my, and given it has not read-out, I was left guessing what was happening and why. The other thing I could use is some kind of vice setup to hold a board to keep it stable yet provide access to both sides.
Yeti Repair: Red Light means Go!
Anyway, I did manage to get the port off cleanly and replace it with a new one and the Yeti mic is back from the dead. A zombie Yeti if you will. Projects to save stuff from an expensive repair or, even worse, the dump are are always the best. I also have a couple of Playstation controllers that are out of service and use the same port in need of repair, but for now I’ll enjoy this small win and put the mic back in rotation. If Tommy doesn’t want it, I might bring it to the bava.studio given it will match the desk there perfectly.
Yeti Mic testing perfectly
Most of the world is broken.
And one day, we will do the fixing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/seinfeld/comments/301rj0/most_of_the_world_is_carpeted_and_one_day_we_will/#lightbox