Issues installing button SHIM

Support
1

Hello!

First time writing here, got a new Pi Zero W and already need your help:

Along with my Pi I ordered a button shim and a Blinkt hat, I planned to but everything together.

However, somehow I can’t get the button shim to work for me. I’ve soldered the shim directly onto the GPIO pins, specifically only on pins 1-6 and 17 (I wanted to wait and see if it would work for me). Afterwards I installed the library and necessary packages on a clean install of raspian lite with the command curl https://get.pimoroni.com/buttonshim | bash.

Now, during the installation I already get the following warning/error messages:

DEPRECATION: The default format will switch to columns in the future. You can use --format
(legacy|columns) (or define a format=(legacy|columns) in your pip.conf under the [list] section) to
disable this warning.
Unable to install smbus for python 2!

DEPRECATION: The default format will switch to columns in the future. You can use --format
(legacy|columns) (or define a format=(legacy|columns) in your pip.conf under the [list] section) to
disable this warning.
Unable to install smbus for python 3!

and after the install:

All done. Enjoy your Button SHIM!

Some packages could not be installed, review the output for details!

So I tried to manually install the python smbus packages, but they seem to be already installed and on the newest version.

When I run any of Pimoroni’s example scripts or a simple python -c "import buttonshim" python throws this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/buttonshim/__init__.py", line 379, in <module>
   _init()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/buttonshim/__init__.py", line 182, in _init
   _bus.write_byte_data(ADDR, REG_CONFIG, 0b00011111)
 IOError: [Errno 121] Remote I/O error

Any help is much appreciated!

2

Can you show us a picture of your soldering.

3

I was fearing it might be the soldering.

Here it is - no eyecandy, but I can’t spot an obvious problem:

IMG_20171020_173446
IMG_20171020_173446.jpg3024×4032 2.31 MB

4

IMG_20171020_173500
IMG_20171020_173500.jpg3024×4032 2.81 MB

5

IMG_20171020_173355
IMG_20171020_173355.jpg3024×4032 2.62 MB

and another angle … Sorry for the repeat posts, but i can only upload 1 image per post

6

I think what you have done is you have flipped the pins you need to solder (you have soldered at the wrong end of the header. You need to solder those pins but at the other end as you can see here:

make sure you line up the mounting holes as in the diagram.

1 Like
7

Sheesh I would have never spotted that- nice catch! At least I’m pretty sure you’re right. The BTN SHIM text is a little misleading for header orientation!

8

OMG I can’t believe that happened. That goes to show you to never make assumptions without checking. It even has a square on the first pin :D

It’s working now, thanks a bunch!!