WARNING! This page is intended as general information, not as repair instructions.
I would not have attempted this if I didn't have experience with surface mount soldering, and a good temperature controlled soldering iron with a very fine tip.

See here for instructions on how to disassemble an iPod Shuffle. Note that removal of the navigation ring is not necessary, and it will be impossible to reattach if removed.

A friend stepped on his iPod Shuffle while it was in its dock, and ripped a ribbon cable off of the USB connector. I offered to take a look at it, and this is what I did.

First, I noticed that a simple replacement of the USB connector would not be possible, since there is a small printed circuit board inside the connector, and the ribbon cable has more than just the four standard USB wires in it. (I later realised that the ribbon cable has four wide conductors, which might correspond to the four USB lines.)



The board was removed from the connector. Then I unsoldered the fragment of cable that was left on the board. Then I superglued the ribbon to the board, and attempted to solder the tracks on the PCB to what remained of the conductors in the cable. This didn't work. The superglue melted, and smelled bad, and the whole thing was generally a big mess, as you can see in the photo above.

Next, I got some 600 grit sandpaper and sanded the insulation off of the copper side of the ribbon. This took a while, but eventually I felt I had exposed enough copper to attempt soldering. I put flux on the board and cable, tinned the exposed copper, and put solder on the PCB traces. Then I placed the cable on the board, and soldered it.

This worked very well.

Then I decided to test the connection before going any further. I bought a USB cable, cut it in half, and soldered it to the board according to this pinout.

Then I plugged it in to my computer, and wonder of wonders, it worked! (I was very proud.)

The next step was to rebuild the connector so that it would look nicer, be easy to use, and not have cables hanging off of it. I ordered a Mini-B surface mount connector and an A to Mini-B cable from Digikey. I desoldered the cable from the board, and started building a connector housing out of styrene. Then I soldered 30 AWG wire to the connector board, put a piece of sticker on top for eletrical insulation, and superglued the connector upside down on top of that. Then I soldered the wires to the connector.

I had to cut parts out of the inside of the cap to make it fit.

The end result, while not as nice-looking or as easy to use as the original, functions well, and is a lot better than a broken iPod.