VHS Tape Storage Drive

Step 5 Wire up the Thumb Drive

You will need to solder wires to the USB positive and negative connections. Have a look at this USB pinout page for information or just meter the outside pins to determine the polarity. Some helping hands will make soldering the connection easier. I would recommend using some helping hands that have a magnifier built into them. The third connection that you need to solder to is the LED output that was identified in the last step. One word of caution here, I soldered to the surface mount resistor to access the signal and it worked fine but broke off a few minutes later. Even though the gauge of the wire was small it had enough leverage to pull the solder and pad from the surface mount device. I had to scrape the solder mask from the trace and solder to that. Once I confirmed that it was working I poured hot glue over the entire device to make sure there was no more strain on any of the connections.