How I soldered on my PICO LIPO Shim

I wanted a nice close fit so I removed the plastic base part of the header on the PICO’s first 8 pins on each side. Dropped the LIPO Shim on, and put a female header on to hold the pins in place while I resoldered them. If you don’t they will fall out of position.
The soldering doesn’t look the best but the Castellated pads on both boards are soldered together, and the pins are properly soldered on the PICO. I may go back and redo it but its all working fine at the moment.
Doing it this way, anything I plug into the PICO will sit nice and flat on the remaining header. No having one end propped up etc by the extra thickness of the LIPO Shim.



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Just a heads up, I hadn’t flashed a uf2 file to my PICO before soldering on the LIPO Shim.
If the white LED on the shim is on, press the button on the shim to it off.
Now plug in your USB cable, press and hold the Boot button, press the button on the shim to turn it back on, and release the boot button.
Now you can and drop my Pimoroni UF2 file to the PICO.

If the white led on the shim is on the Pico is on. Pressing the Boot button while its on does nothing. Just something to get used to and to remember down the road.

That’s quite a nice tidy way to do it, it’s a shame the button is right underneath the USB port but I can’t see anywhere else they could have put it.

It worked out nicely. The solder on the pins on the shim is lower than the black header base. and there is enough of the base left that anything you plug in ends up nice and level.
Running on just battery power, no USB cable plugged in, button access isn’t too bad. It does get tricky with a USB cable plugged in though. It is what it is. Design decisions are often a compromise to get the functionality you want and or need.

thanks for the awesome information.

The only really hard part was getting that black plastic base off. I split the headers into 12 and 8 pin lengths before I soldered them on. If I ever do it again I’ll likely split the 8 pin into two 4 pin headers. I got scared I was going to mangle a pin or two getting them off so I got my Dremel out and used a ball mill to cut some of the header away on one side. After I did that they slide off pretty easily.

thanks for the awesome information.