Illutorium

The wacom Intuos 4 is known for having issues with poorly attached mini-USB ports, and my tablet (Intuos 4 Large) finally broke down completely, as explained here wacom wanted hundreds of dollars to fix it.

Being a total newbie and never having soldered anything in my life I still managed to fix it for free. Instead of using the USB-connector I chose to bypass it completely and instead hard-wire the USB cables directly to the circuit board. This is a small guide for how to do that:

What you need: Soldering iron and solder. Tiny screw driver Plastic card (like a credit card) Wire cutter. (or anything to cut an USB wire) Glue.

How to do it: - Screw open the wacom tablet. Remember the screws under the rubber feet. - There are internal plastic clips located by the buttons. Use your plastic card to disengage them. Be careful not to snag any wires.

- Remove the back cover of the tablet. Find the broken USB port you want to bypass. - Cut the USB connector off your USB cable, we won’t be needing it. - Strip the wire to expose 4 smaller wires inside it. One red, green, black and white. - Strip a tiny bit of the smaller wires to expose the metal inside them. I melted away the plastic - Put some solder on the end of each wire and then solder them exactly like this diagram shows.

The circuit board of course have a lot of different stuff on it, chips, transistors and whatnot. But in this image I just drew the important ones that we will work with. Make sure you do not short circuit by using too much solder or having exposed metal from the wires touching each other.

- Glue the large USB wire to the plastic of the wacom tablet. - Screw it back together.

Done and done!

Update: Do you have a Medium or Small tablet? In that case solder like this:

Reason? Windows XP nostalgy.