So, since I'm daily driving this old thing, and I only have the cradle for it, and a knockoff USB cable starts at 10 bucks, I decided to look into adding a USB jack for charging. I dug around in the many boxes of junk and found A USB micro jack on a bit of PCB, probably from a powerbank some time ago..
I got the idea to attempt putting it next to the dock connector, where there are couple of seemingly unused divets..
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It's like that spot was made for it, weirdly enough.. I'm sure HP had me in mind when they designed this.
So, out with the hole-ification tools, with which I got carried away and made a horrid mess of said hole with, in the plastic that turned out to be about as sturdy as cheese. I'm not that pleased with it tbh, but here we are. It's really only bad if you look at it, and it's worse from the inside.
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But, it fits! So I proceeded to dab a generous drop of gel superglue onto the board and placed the jack down. Waited a while and soldered a couple of wires from it to the main PCB, to pads that carry +5V and GND from the dock connector.
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It's not the best looking thing in the world, but it's in there, reasonably straight and is flush with the exterior. In hindsight I should have checked the mounting depth with a cable plugged in, because it's on the edge of being a little sticky-outy compared to the dock connector. And needlessly so, as can be seen by the amount of plug stick-out on the last picture.
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But, it works! Here it is having dinner from a USB powerbank.
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