Phat Beat soldering question

Hi all,

I’ve just build my first Pirate Radio and sound is crackling a bit, and LEDs are not working. I assume this is due to my bad soldering capabilities!

In order to redo them, I’ve checked https://fr.pinout.xyz/pinout/phat_beat, and wondering if it’s OK to have only those 11 GPIO pins (+ power supply) soldered, and leave the other ones clean?

Also, which one specifically I should look at re. the LEDs connection and sound (all control buttons are working OK for no)?

Many thanks

It is usually recommended to solder ALL the earth pins as well just to be sure but, for best mechanical strength to keep the connector fastened to the board when plugging and unplugging it from the Pi, why not solder all the pins anyway.
(the more pins you solder, for practice at least, the easier it gets to solder even more :-)

Jessie or Stretch? Stretch is recommended now, and some changes were made to fix issues that may not work correctly if your running still running Jessie.

@neilman - thanks, that make sense re. consolidating the board

@alphanumeric - I’m running stretch, and have also setup the pi using instructions from https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/sandyj/streaming-spotify-to-your-pi

OK, I did the Pirate Radio (VLC Radio) install. I had some issues in the past with Jessie, but all is fine now with Stretch.