Snapped off your socket? This quick hack might save your pi!
From SirLagz.com:
A few months ago, the SD card socket on my original Raspberry Pi broke off to do an unfortunate smelting accident…No, not really. It was just dropped onto the SD card socket and snapped.
After some months of trying a few different fixes, I eventually gave up and bought a 512mb Raspberry Pi instead. But recently with some new ideas, I wanted another Pi to test out a few different things at once. Since I had a Pi lying around already, I decided to have another crack at fixing it.
I found a SD card socket that was almost a perfect fit for the Pi from Element 14 (SKU 2081361)The old SD Card had already been de-soldered from my earlier attempts, so I just had to line up the pins and solder them down.
There are 2 floating pins (on the right in the picture) that are used to detect whether the card is inserted, which are at the opposite end of where they should be, so I ended up just leaving them be, and on the Pi itself soldered the 2 pins that should have been connected there. This means that the Pi will always think that there’s a SD card inserted. Apart from those 2 pins, each and every other single pin lined up perfectly.
My soldering isn’t great so the SD card socket is a bit crooked, but the SD card still fits in beautifully in the case that I also purchased off Element 14.
After soldering, I inserted an SD card, and successfully booted up the Pi with the new SD card
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.
We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!
If you use micro-SD cards, then the Ada-fruit Half-Size Micro SD card adaptor glued in place is a nice fix!
http://adafruit.com/products/966
Also, saves any chance of it breaking again too.
Details here:
http://pihw.wordpress.com/2013/02/23/occupational-hazards-proudly-protecting-my-poorly-pi-perfectly/