Mounting button shim under pi zero W2

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1

I’ve just managed to grab a new zero W2 (yay for the Camby Pi Store!) and was looking to set it up with a button shim mounted underneath it (to leave the GPIO pins above free for a normal HAT/pHAT).

Having a play with some headers, it looks like with the header pins the “normal” way up (long side upwards and short side downwards) the pins won’t be long enough to solder everything together. I can of course put the header on upside down, but then the short pins which will be above aren’t long enough to connect to a normal HAT female header (although a Blinkt does seem to fit).

My question is, does anyone know of anywhere you can get a header pin array with longer pins going both upward and downward? All I can find here and from a quick search around is headers with longer or normal pins going upward, but the downward end of the pins is always the same shorter length.

2

Depending of course on how much longer you need the pins to be each side of the plastic “pin holder” you could carefully push the pins further into the plastic - they are only a friction fit so you could change the header pins
from --------xx-- to this -----xx-----
or are the pins still too short for your purpose?

3

That is an excellent suggestion.

So after a short period with a pair of pliers and an old extended pin header, I now have what I wanted in a “both way” standard pin header, plus a rather perforated thumb.

But job’s a good 'un, I think this will work

4

Excellent - see, you don’t have to look for an expensive or complicated solution … sometimes :-)

5

Just to give the proper answer, what you needed was this long-pinned female header 2x20 pin Female GPIO Header for Raspberry Pi - Pimoroni [the 11mm variant].

Push the pins up through the board to give the usual pins on top, leaving sockets underneath. You can then use either Dupont male jumper wires to connect, or solder onto the short end of ‘normal’ pins and insert the long ends into the socket - either a strip of a few pins, or a full set of 2x 20. Be careful of the pin orientation - may be mirror image of what you expect

6

That would work, but would also make the stack far too thick for what I need.

Neil’s solution was what I was looking for, and worked fine. The shim is now mounted up underneath the zero and working fine with a normal empty header above.

7

Too late now, but I got things working with the shim on to of the board but under the header. The shorter pins were long enough to go through the shim and the pi, leaving regular length above the pin holder