My Pi Zero Hacks

This is two hacks actually. The first was swapping the male header for a 90 female. Soldered on the bottom instead of the top maintains the correct pinout. And it lets me plug it directly into a pHat Stack or mini Black hat Hacker. I can plug it into the ribbon cable header and ditch the ribbon cable. All the ports are pointing up for easy access. The Pibow case will fit with some minor modifications.

The second hack was adding a shutdown and boot up buttons. I used two PICO Captain Resetti buttons. One on GPIO 3 for boot. and one on GPIO 5 for shutdown.
If you shutdown and leave your Pi powered, momentarily grounding GPIO 3 will have it boot up. And you can use it to shutdown after adding dtoverlay entry to config.txt.
dtoverlay=gpio-shutdown
There is a gotcha though, it won’t work on GPIO 3 if i2c is enabled, you have to use an alternate GPIO pin, like so
dtoverlay=gpio-shutdown,gpio_pin=5,active_low=1,gpio_pull=up

It just worked out that GPIO 3 is two pins away from a ground pin, same deal for GPIO 5. That let me use the PICO reset button. The Castellated edges made soldering easy. They will be on the back side (bottom) of the Pi. Not a big deal for me as thats the side facing me in my use case scenario.

In that first picture my Boot Up and Shut Down buttons are on the second Proto Zero that has an RV3028 RTC breakout on it.

That’s an awesome idea! I hadn’t thought of using the Captain Resetti buttons. I’de been planning on getting some for the picos, but a few more as general purpose buttons seems like a good idea. If you had a tiny double throw button you could (possibly) have the one button for both, but it’d be more fiddly.

My 2 Pi Zero 2 hacks (so far) are to solder the button shim under the header so it’s flush with the board*, and I soldered the header onto a second pi upsidedown then clipped off the pins sticking out the other side, made it nice and low profile for my flirc case. I love the case, but I’m thinking of drilling a small hole and a lightpipe so I can see the power led.

I actually got the shim after I had soldered on the header, so I had to solder it on the underside of the zero, I had to shave a little of the zero board to fit it on, so I’d recommend putting it between the board ad header. Just a shame you can’t use it as a startup button.

The trick is finding a GPIO pin that has a ground 2 pins over from it to match the resetti button layout.

Yeah, the button shim uses i2c via the onboard chip. No way to get that to work as boot up.

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