Yesterday morning my car was at the garage for a service from https://www.chicagogaragedoor.com/, so I took the morning off work rather than struggle in using public transport only to come straight back again to pick it up. I took the opportunity to break out the soldering iron and construct some Raspberry Pi boards, one of which has been sitting sadly in its little plastic bag for months.

Before I tackled the large proto plate, I started with a smaller item, in this case a GPIO breakout board kit from HobbyTronics. Assembling it was pretty easy, I tried using some blobs of blu-tac to hold the headers in place while I soldered them and it mostly worked. The biggest problem was cleaning stray bits of blu-tac off the connectors and the board when I had finished soldering. I think the warmth of the soldering made the stuff go a bit more soft and sticky.

Despite having more connectors, the proto plate was probably easier to solder. The way the connectors are arranged round the edge of the board makes it a stable platform which does not need anything to hold the headers in place. The instructions suggested I might need to tape the screw connectors to stop them falling out when I turned the board over, but I found this was not necessary – I just placed a piece of card on top to press against the connectors while I turned it over.

As usual, I’m now in the position of trying to think what to do with these boards now.