I am an IT student and that means I do not have lots of money and I use my mouse a lot. However, about a month ago my mouse starting randomly diconnecting and it got worse and worse to the point where it would not be recognised by my computer anymore. It has a small led on it and when "disconnecting" I noticed it went dimmer for a moment before going out, and my usb port was shut off. I figured out that this was a short circuit and disassembled it, found the point of short circuit by measuring conductivity of each pin of the usb cable and found out that the green cable (data+ IIRC) was shorted to the shield so I cut the cable and now I have a section of the cable fully working. However when trying to rewire I noticed 5 pins in my mouse internal connector. 4 of them were for data/5V but one was connected to the shield. Reconnecting it to the shield is complicated for me since it was braided around the other cables and do not offer a clean soldering point. I was wondering if leaving it unconnected was a problem or if it would risk to damage anything. If it would damage only the mouse it's ok since it was not working anymore. Reconnecting the shield seems important since it was connected but I have no actual idea how it works and if it really needs to be connected. Thanks in advance for your help.
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1The four wires in USB are ground, 5V (VCC), data +, and data -. The braided shield on the wire is also connected to GND, and is used for noise suppression. You can leave it disconnected, but it may make the mouse more susceptible to interference. – JYelton Apr 22 '20 at 22:56
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@JYelton I'd make that an answer – Alex Hajnal Apr 23 '20 at 00:43
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I didn't because repair questions like this are off-topic, but I still wanted to help. – JYelton Apr 23 '20 at 00:47
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if you are splicing two sections of the cable, then do not solder the spliced wires because solder makes the wire brittle and the wires will break during normal use of the mouse ...... instead, twist the wire ends together and insulate them with heatshrink tubing ... that way the wire will stay flexible – jsotola Apr 23 '20 at 02:16
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Thank you all for your answers! I'm sorry if I was off-topic but that website looked the closest to a stack-overflow for hardware and I had no idea where else to look for help with electronics. @jsotola, The soldering would be done inside the mouse where the cable is staying still so it should be ok but I'll still try to find heat shrinkable tubes. – Aïto Hedgestock Apr 23 '20 at 07:00