Soldering headers to Raspberry Pi Pico
Raspberry Pi Pico can run some neat code, it can blink that LED, and you could get it to input things, and print on that serial console. But it’s going to be lots more fun if we start plugging stuff into it! To do that, it will need headers soldered into it. Soldering may seem daunting the first time around, but with practice, it will be a skill you’ll use repeatedly in robot building.
We are going to be soldering header pins into Raspberry Pi Pico. These are breakaway pin headers:
Figure 2.5 – Breakaway pin headers
Pin headers will let us plug Pico into a breadboard so that we can connect it to other electronics or use Pico with female cables to link to sensors. There are other kinds—female kinds, not so useful for the breadboard—and you can get 2-row pin headers, which you’ll see in other Raspberry Pi models.
To get the right number of pins, we need to measure and snap...