Hi,
when my charging board broke, minute provided immediate assistance to me on IRC to get my pocket back in action: 2025-05-22.log
Since there is no structured guide for this from MNT (yet) and since I just took these photos anyways, I wanted to share these steps with you in case they are useful for somebody. This expands on what @staticbunny already wrote in their post (also with photos) but uses one of the jumpers from the Pocket Reform motherboard as suggested by minute instead of a custom bridge. Another write-up on this topic was performed by @benedikt in their post here.
The idea is to bridge pins 2 and 3 of connector J1 as @Jonas had already written here. Here is a screenshot of the relevant part of the KiCAD schematics:
As @Jonas notes, the above can also be found on page 14 of the manual
According to minute, the recommended way to bypass the charger is to first unplug the two cables from the J1 9-pin connector and then borrow one of the extra 2 mm jumpers from the internal usb-header just next to the internal usb-c connector. That jumper is then placed on pins 2 and 3 (counted from the left) of J1, the 9-pin connector to which the charger board was connected:
That way, as one can see in the schematics above, the “power to the charger” and “power from the charger” lines are bridged, essentially bypassing the charger completely. Here is a close-up:
With that modification performed, one can now operate the Pocket Reform from an external USB-C PD power source. I am carrying a power bank around with me until my replacement charger board arrives. That way, I’m still mobile with my Pocket Reform despite the broken charger board.