Connecting USB D+/D- pins to PCB?

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synfinatic

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Any suggestions for connecting the USB D+/D- pins to a PCB? I'd like to expose a USB port for my project, but would rather not use the one built in on the Teensy 3.1.

I've found some references to pogo pins, but I haven't found any which are short enough for mounting in the short space when just soldering the board directly with some header pins.
 
Two options come to mind:

Use perfboard to provide strain relief. Solder some very thin wires to D+ and D-.
Solder a USB cable to some perfboard that will get connected to D+/D-, +5V and VND.
Thread the tiny wires through a small perfboard.
Attach perfboard with headers to four pins spanning the bottom of the Teensy.

Alternatively, if you have a spare pin hole near the connector end of the Teensy, use the hole to provide strain relief.
Solder tiny wires to D+ and D-.
Twist these wires together.
Thread them through the hole.
Glue the wires in place using cyanoacrylate or silicone.
 
Actually, I just need to electrically make contact with the D+/D- pads on the Teensy to the custom PCB below. No need for strain relief or anything like that since the other USB connector will also be soldered to the PCB and I'll use traces to connect things up. I just can't figure out a good way to bridge the gap between the small D+/D- pads and the PCB the Teensy is mounted to.
 
The right way to do it is to surface mount the Teensy, so have all the pads etc on the PCB, stencil solder paste down and then reflow the lot. This of course assumes a whole bunch of skills and equipment you may not have.

If you are working through hole an option that may be good enough is:
Tin both pads before soldering pins onto your Teensy
Design your PCB with a pair of oversize holes without copper (1-2mm dia) lined up with the pads. Not having the copper is to avoid heat sinking in the next step
Tin a reasonably sized solid core wire, pre heat it then feed it through the hole keeping iron in contact with the wire to keep it hot. Use pliers for this since the whole wire is going to heat up.
Then solder the wire down the the relevant place on the PCB, noting the need to keep D- and D+ as a balanced pair.
Idea is to use the wire to heat the pad area, which goes against sensible soldering practice (have both parts to be joined at the same temperature and heated at the same time).
I have done this to salvage things when two boards are already soldered together but would not suggest it for any released design since the vertical wire to pad bond is going to be marginal.

A better solution if space and design allows would be to use a pair of wires as described above and run them off to either your PCB or the socket, which will maintain the impedance and noise canceling nature of the twisted pair.
 
Yeah, sadly, I'm not really setup for doing reflow work.

Yeah, it would probably be easier if the edge holes were cut in half to make it easy to surface mount. Then I easily could do plated holes under the various pads and just solder them directly from under the PCB. That wouldn't be too bad. I suppose I could do it even without the holes cut in half, but it sure would make things easier.

That's an interesting suggestion with the solid core wire, but I agree it seems a bit hackish- not something I would want to rely on.
 
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