Swapping my Laptop’s Charging port to USBC

Left: Lenovo Box Connector for 90W Charging

Right: USB-C PD Board Rev. 2

Have you looked at your laptop connector and thought, “What’s stopping me from changing it?” Well, I took the challenge and was able to successfully swap from the boxy Lenovo Charging port over to the sleek and simple USB-C PD (Power Delivery) standard.

When I first opened the bottom panel of my laptop, the first thing that I noticed was that the charging port is actually removable. The port was attached via a 5-pin JST (Japanese Solderless Terminal) connector on the Laptop motherboard. This allowed me to perform any soldering needed and, most importantly, not damage any motherboard components through heat exposure.

The Lenovo connector originally had 5 wires, two red, two black, and one white. Using typical wire color conventions, red is power, black is ground, and white ended up being sensor wire. Soldering was very simple, both red wires go to the positive terminal and both black wires go to the negative terminal. The white wire took some research and ended up needing to be a specific resistor value tied with ground. The 5V connection had to be scraped off in order to allow of a 20V input on the Adafruit PD Board.

Resistor Values needed in order for a charger to be recognized

For Rev. 1, I utilized the Adafruit USB-C PD Board HUSB238 stocked at M5:

The largest issue with the board was space constraints, fitting this into the connector spot wasn’t possible, so I removed a neighboring board housing a USB-A Port. I also had to shave parts of the bottom panel in order to barely fit the board in.

For Rev. 2, I used a smaller PD board I bought off of Amazon, which did fit into the constrained space where the older charging port was

Lastly, I had help from Alex Reineke, who quickly created a small box CAD model with the exact dimensions of the original boxy port. I pushed the PD board into the housing and then reconnected the cable back to my motherboard.

Here is the final product!