Hammer Horror

I thought I’d add some lights and whatnot to my printer server. This means adding header pins to my Pi. I thought I’d use the hammer headers from Pimoroni rather than do soldering. I bought a bunch a while back because they were reduced. They are reduced at the moment too.

The idea is simple enough. Pop the Pi on the jig, insert the headers, pop the cover thing on and then bash it with a hammer until the pins are in. Except that I got a bit too keen and bashed the pins all the way through the board (don’t do this). “Never mind”, I thought. “I’ll just pull the pins back a bit and all will be well”. It wasn’t. I then spent an entire morning trying to work out why my pixels weren’t lighting up before discovering that if the pins go all the way through the board they don’t make proper contact. If you have a go with these make sure that you arrange things so that the pins don’t go very far out of the other side of the Pi.

I got the board to work by soldering all the pins into place. And on the journey to this I discovered lots of fun things about controlling neopixels from Python on a Pi. Pro tip: your code has to run in supervisor mode. It really made me want to go back to using a PICO where it all just works.

Anyhoo, I’ve got my leds working now, which is nice.