Got my LED shim yesterday. I have it mounted to Pico Hat hacker, that will let me mount it behind a diffusor. Stand offs on the Pico Hat hacker board. I put male headers on the back of the Pico Hat Hacker. I’ll use female to female jumpers to connect it to my Pi.
I was getting an IO error until I wired pin 20 to ground. Its listed on the pinout page. I wanted to see if I could get by with out it. I just ran a wire from pin 6 to pin 20 on the Pico Hat hacker. Working fine now. test.py ran fine and ran a few of the examples. To be honest I’m totally lost as to what is actually going on in the examples? My python skills are I would say average. I’ll plug away at it though.
Glad to hear that you haven’t experienced any problems using yours as a solder-less shim. I have two in use at the moment—but have had no luck using either of them as they were intended—i.e. both have now been soldered to female headers.
From the looks of it, it seems no one else has had trouble with them either…
JFYI, I soldered mine. Its soldered to the Pico Hat hacker board with a male header. I didn’t solder all 40 pins though. For the most part I only soldered the pins actually used shown in the GPIO pinout. And all the ground pins, that was more to just to hold it firmly in place and add rigidity. From the Pico Hat hacker to the Pi it’s jumper wires. And I only soldered on 4 pins for that. V+, Ground, and the two i2c wires.
This Pi gets moved around, and banged around a little bit in the trunk of my care. I didn’t want the LED shim moving or getting crooked etc.
Actually I had trouble recently with a Black HAT Hacker or similar. I had a header installed which had flatter pins than the regular Pi headers, so the contact (that we’d so painstakingly tested on the Pi) just didn’t get made. Is there a chance you could have a flatter GPIO header throwing a spanner into the works?
Phil, it wouldn’t have happened to be this one would it? The 11mm one.
The pins on those are a bit on the flimsy side, IMHO. I find it way to easy to bend one when putting a hat on top. You have to have a good look see first for any pins slightly out of alignment.
It is possible. But as I believe I mentioned above at the beginning of the thread I was using Pimoroni’s ‘thicker’ male header (‘thicker’ compared to what I get from my local Dutch pi distributer).
My recommendation is to just solder it in. Assuming you don’t plan on moving it to another project. There are only 5 pins that need soldering. The 2 i2c pins, the +5V and two grounds. Pins 3, 4, 5, 6 and 20. If you use minimal solder you should still be able to mount a pHat of Hat on top.
Old topic yes, but I bought mine 2019-02-22 and it didn’t work. I don’t see any version number on it.
Turns out I had the same problem. At first I assumed “remote i/o error” would be software, so I shelved it and intended to fight with software later. It went back on the pile of “not yet working” hardware - for small stuff like it’s very easy to file under “don’t buy any more from there”.
Then I found this thread and see it’s a hardware problem. Please can the driver be updated to warn that it’s likely to be hardware not software?
Also please can the forum have a shortcut with a purchased product? Maybe a two-posting shortcut per item?
I bent pins 4,6,20 (according to https://pinout.xyz/pinout/led_shim) upwards and got some success. It was difficult to fit the shim because it no longer slides on neatly, and I’m worried about cracking the solder joints as the shim flexes. Also I needed to apply additional downward pressure on pins 3,5 by fingernail while the board was in place, so it looks like additional bending is required. Or solder, but I don’t know yet where I want to put it.
The other thing I noticed is that the board has four gold test or pogo points. They don’t seem to be connected to anything - what are they for? Could they be connected “next time” so we can use them for tribbleshooting?
I did try testing for continuity from header to places on the shim, but could only find one 0v and the 5v coming out on resistors. There wasn’t anything else that looks wise to poke with a multimeter tip. (That was about the second or third time I gave up on the board)
I think those 4 test points are just two VIA’s. I think thats what they are called? Its a connection from one layer of the board to another. Its a double sided board and those two points connect one side to the other.
Those are “fiducial marks” and are for lining up the pick and place robot.
Thanks, didn’t know about those.
Now I’m looking, I see one on the front of the Pi Zero v1.3 … but on the back, none and a load of pogo points. If they could be dual-purpose that might be nice.
There are no surface mount parts on the back of a Pi Zero, so I would say no need for the marker. ;)