The Raspberry Pi Thread [4]

I don't do this a lot but I think I did good enough... haha...

And this isn't any easier...

Not bad... Got it to work in one try... (except for that little mishap with my soldering skills where I thought I fried the pi... :) )

The soldering was a bit rough to be honest. I've seen worse though. I thought I saw a couple of pins shorted together on the Pi? Is that what you meant by "I thought I fried a Pi"?
It takes a fair bit of practice to get good at soldering. I think one common mistake is people try to go too fast, thinking the heat is going to damage something. 3 or 4 or so seconds isn't going to hurt anything. And if you have to redo it, just wait 5 or 10 seconds for it to cool down. Or keep going and come back to it.

Yeah, I am sure it's not the way it was suppose to come out. Fact is, this is my first time soldering those headers to a board :) . The scroll phat isn't too hard because it came with the correct header. But for the Pi Zero, I forgot to order the male headers so I used a generic one with long pins on both sides. I had to cut and shorten one side but it was still a tad long. Soldering was a bit tricky. Mostly too much solder. Haha..
There was NO shorted pins. I checked with a magnifying glass before plugging it in. The problem was one of the first pins (with too much solder) shorted with a copper (with a hole) on the pi board as shown below. I just scratched it with a scalpel to separate the solder from the board and it was okay. Took me a while to figure out it was the problem. I thought it was due to shorted pins as well.

I find critiquing somebodies solder job a bit tricky some times. Your never really sure how well they may take negative comments. You also don't want to put them off from ever trying it again. Or trying to fix what they did wrong. It can be pretty messy and still work. When you know that person its a bit easier.
What I do is touch the tip to the pad on the board so its touching the pad and the pin. Wait a second or so and apply a little bit of solder. Then move my tip straight up the pin. Heat both the pad and the pin and the solder will flow all the way around the base of the pin and get you good contact. You can draw you iron away to the side too, I like to go up though. A solder sucker, or the solder braid with flux in it helps cleaning things up and removing excess solder. Just retouching with a clean hot tip will do it too. Like I said earlier, it takes a bit of practice and knowing what it should look like to get good at it. I've been doing it since I was 20 something so 40+ years lol. Not as often as I used to but often enough to keep my skills up to snuff.

I have no issue people telling me how I did. I am just happy I got it to work with limited skills. Haha... Thank you for the tips!!!

The other thing I do, when doing something with a lot of pins like a GPIO header. Is do every second pin on one side. The do every second pin in the second row. Then go back to row 1 and finish it. Then row 2 and finish it. It spreads the heat out so there is less chance of damaging something. Just a habit I picked up many years ago early in my carer as an electronic tech.

badrobot said:

I have no issue people telling me how I did. I am just happy I got it to work with limited skills. Haha... Thank you for the tips!!!