Taranis Qx7 USB-C Mod

I added USB-C support to my Taranis qx7 cause why not.

Some of the pictures are sideways, I tried to fix them but Instructables said no.

• Female USB-C breakout board.

I got mine off aliexpress and they took about 2 months to arrive, but they work and it was only 4$ shipped. Make sure you get the female version, I got the male at first which delayed this project by about 2 months.

• Some wire (anything in a pretty thin gauge should work)
• Some glue (I used hot glue)
• Soldering equipment
• Some decent soldering skills

These are the little boards I used, a USB-C plug actually has 12 pins on each side but we only need four of them. Luckily AliExpress sells boards that only have the four USB pads so I bought those.

I made a little pigtail out of mine with an old 4-strand ribbon wire which helps a lot for cleanliness and esthetics.

Now we gotta solder some tiny wires to some tiny pads.

The red circles in the picture are not the only options but that is what I used and it works. The ground wire can go anywhere grounded, I picked there because it's easy to solder to. You can also try to solder directly to the USB-mini connecter but the pads are pretty close together and will probably short.

You can kinda see in the second pic I trimmed the data wires down to almost nothing to avoid shorting with adjacent pads.

Now its time to secure the wires to the PCB for obvious reasons. I just melted some of that yellow hot glue you find in Chinese electronics with a torch and dripped it on the wires... they're not moving though so that's good.

I'm sure superglue or likewise would work just fine, you just don't want the wires bending or moving at all.

I decided to mount it under the TX module PCB inside the radio, which ends up right above the headphone jack on the outside of the radio.

Here I scrapped the hell out of the back of the potentiometer so the glue would stick and melted a hole in my radio with a soldering iron to put the pigtail through. Then I glued the pigtail to the pot and screwed the TX PCB back on. (forgot to take pics of that)

This is what the finished product looks like from the outside, and so far it works a treat.

If you do this mod I'm not going to take responsibility if USB support dies on your radio, but it probably won't.