The problem with USB-C connectors for hobby projects is that they are ass to solder by hand—I’m still looking for one that would use a larger pitch by shorting the four USB pin pairs for either orientation. If you’re shipping something to a customer, I think it’s fair to assume that you don’t really have that problem :)

Get a hot air gun: it'll make your life way easier. You can tin the pads with a soldering iron, put the connector on and squirt some flux on the leads, and then just blow hot air until it reflows into place.

What do you do if the structural through-holes already have solder in them, that wick doesn’t seem to get? I’ve been trying to put a new USB C port onto my switch for quite a while now. (Now that I think about it, I can probably just shorten the prongs on the port and add solder after for structural strength).

A desoldering pump (manual model, $10 or so for a decent one) is very suitable for removing solder from through-holes, if that is the main issue.

I often add solder to make it easier for the wick to get everything. If the original assy was Lead-Free, using low temp solder (I can has lead? As a treat?) may make a difference here as well. Flux pen on the solder wick also seems to help especially if your wick is kinda crusty.

Melt the solder and thwack the board on something hard? So the board stops but the molten solder doesn't.

Sometimes though you just have to pile on solder and flux because the via is small enough that surface tension and heat dissipation means its never coming out

Doesn't a pump make quick work of this?

Frequently not. It's always handy to know about extra techniques in soldering.

You can also scale this up in a solder oven and remove almost every single component. Used this for reversing a PCB a few times.

The answer to almost every question in soldering is 'more flux'. Solder wick has flux in the center of the braid, but it's hard to get it into tight places like structural through-holes. Adding your own liquid/paste flux will make the wick much more effective.

A good solder sucker is your friend.

I have the SS-02, and I like it - I had one of the cheap blue ones first, but the pliable rubber tip really makes a difference. If you’re soldering smd by hand, it’s more than worth the $20

How would tinning those tiny pads not create a massive bridge between them? Does the bridge somehow go away in the reflow phase? (Not familiar with reflow at all)

Using with a little flux while tinning usually prevents the pads from bridging

Yes, the surface tension of melted solder pulls the solder to just the pad areas (assuming you don’t have far too much)

To add to the sister comments, you can quite easily remove such bridges by adding flux and then touching each individual pad with a fine tipped soldering iron. It sometimes takes a few tries, but eventually the solder that’s touching the solder mask will either be wicked onto the iron or move onto one of the neighboring pads. (The trick is to touch just the pads with the iron, and not to try to attack the solder bridge itself.)

Make sure there is soldermask between the pads. This makes soldering much easier!

(If your foundry can't fabricate it, then make the pads thinner until they can fabricate the soldermask.)

Do you find the 6-pin charge-only Type-C connectors too small? Or the 16-pin 2.0-only ones? They seem reasonably hand-solder-friendly but I admit I've been fortunate enough to have the factory handling them for me.

Yeah, I find the 16-pin ones a little beyond my skill. They also feel silly—why can’t I have one with just six pins for D±, VBUS, GND, and CC1/2? I guess I could have a factory make a bunch of modules like that for me, but it definitely feels like a thing that should already exist.

(There are passive A-to-C adapters, so I see no reason why I couldn’t short pin pairs like that.)

You cannot do that because of how the connector flips over.

(Believe me, I have tried to make it work.)

Could you clarify? As far as I can tell, GND is A1/B1 and A12/B12, VBUS is A4/B4 and A9/B9, D+ is A6/B6, and D− is A7/B7, and each A pin swaps with its B counterpart when I flip the connector.

Only one side of the cable is going to be lit, but you don't know which one it is: it depends on whatever happened upstream. So you have to be able to handle either side being lit up. You can't easily do that with a single set of contacts because of how D+/D- is handled (it would be a literal X-shaped crossover), so now you're kind of stuck.

It ends up just not being worth the trouble if you need the USB 2.0 pair. But power-only is much easier and, guess what, pretty available in the market.

The 6-pin Type-C provides 2 pins each for power, ground, and CC. (DO NOT LEAVE CC OUT. THIS IS WHY A LOT OF RECENT USB STUFF MISBEHAVES. GET CC1/2 RIGHT PLEASE.)

The 16-pin adds 10 more: 4 for D+/D-, 2 more each for power and ground, and then they add 2 more for SBU as well. I'm not entirely sure why SBU is important enough but I'd guess it's because it's physically vertically next to CC so probably helps the mechanicals to leave it in.

There actually do exist 8-pin guys like this https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C47326494.html (among others) that add D+/D- only to the 6-pin connectors. I can't imagine they work terribly well most of the time but they must have some use? They do seem to be from Asian vendors only, which might mean something.

(Side note: the way Type-C handles D+ and D- has caused me so much pain. I get that it was a difficult problem to solve... but there had to be a better way than this, right? Probably not, but I can still whine.)

> There actually do exist 8-pin guys like this https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C47326494.html

I was glad to see this at first (because I did page through Mouser and LCSC a bit before I came back here to continue my bitching and found nothing). Then I actually looked at the drawing, and— Excuse me, is that really a USB-C socket that only works in one orientation?.. The drawing shows that the socket has both CC1 (A5) and CC2 (B5) but only one of the two copies of D+ (A6 but not B6) and D- (A7 but not B7). Seriously? Even I don’t hate my users that much.

Yep. I couldn't believe it existed either. I was even curious enough to ask an LLM about it and got the same response: it doesn't know of a use beyond creating frustration.

I guess past-me was smart when drawing USB-C connector symbols in my library and this one doesn't exist there for a reason!

I have soldered the 12-pin, power-only USB-C connectors. The real breakthrough came though when I tried a hotplate rather than soldering iron for the USB-C connector.

They're also ass to make PCBs for. The second you need 2oz or higher you start to really push the limits of what most prototype shops can do.

This is a pretty standard 2.0 receptacle, you've only got 0.2mm between pads if you follow their footprint (literally the limit for soldermask bridges on 2oz at JLCPCB): https://gct.co/download?type=PDFDrawing&name=USB4105.pdf