New Guide: How to Solder Headers – A Beginner’s Guide
We’ve got a new tutorial in the Learning System this week from Erin St. Blaine: how to solder headers. If you’ve been having fun with Gemma and Circuit Playground boards and are ready to level up to Adafruit’s Feather and FeatherWing lines with all their fancy features, this is a great place to start. This guide goes over proper soldering techniques for male, female, and stacking headers and also gives tips for de-soldering when things go wrong. From the guide:
Headers are like the duct tape of electronics. They’re great for connecting things together, soldering to perf-boards, or preparing boards for plug-in components like servos or sensors.
Using headers with your microcontroller can make your life much easier, but soldering them on can be a little intimidating to beginners. There are a lot of ways to get it wrong, and once a header is soldered onto a board it’s difficult or impossible to get it off again.
This guide will teach an easy and reliable way to attach your headers, with tips for getting them on straight and accurate, so you can move on with your project with confidence. It will also give advice about pitfalls to avoid, and what to do when you get them on wrong.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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We’ve got a new tutorial in the Learning System this week from Erin St. Blaine: how to solder headers. If you’ve been having fun with Gemma and Circuit Playground boards and are ready to level up to Adafruit’s Feather and FeatherWing lines with all their fancy features, this is a great place to start. This guide goes over proper soldering techniques for male, female, and stacking headers and also gives tips for de-soldering when things go wrong. From the guide: