I would be careful with de-soldering this without a hot air station. You can easily rip off one or more pads!
Normally I hate answers like "Buy this/that". But in this case I'm going to do it anyway ;)
Even a cheap hot air station from AliExpress will be fine for these things. Ow and when you are on AliExpress, buy some Kapton tape. You can use this to shield other components from the heat.
hey carl,
to desolder the micro usb from the pcb you have two options which i think are most common
1st - you dont need the micro usb after desoldering
here if the usb is a waste for you then i recommend to use a pair of plier and gently cut the tht pins and then you a soldering iron with some solder . heat the pad and push the pin upward . this will heat the usb a lot but the job us done. :)
2nd - you need the usb port
here if you find the usb a important useful component in your journey then i recommend to put too much solder on the tht pins of the board and heat them continously after one another and use a plier or a tweezer to pull back the port. the job is done now :)
hope you liked the suggestion
Does it have pins that go through the board, in addition to the surface mount pins?
The way I usually do those is I get a big blob of molten solder all around all of the pins, then pick the connector up with tweezers. I will note that you risk damaging the pins using this method.
Also, sometimes that doesn't work great if there are pins (the shield) through the board. In that case, it sometimes works to use solder-wick to remove the solder in those through-hole joints. Then, you can try using the solder wick to remove the solder from the data+power pins, or just use the solder blob method.
Thanks for the advice.