Coming to electronics as a hobbyist I'm not sure I understand why I have to solder header pins? On more than one occasion when dealing with Arduino / breadboard projects the circuit will not work until the header pins are soldered. Holding them in place will not solve this problem. Why? Low voltage? Need for persistent connection? Holding them in place doesn't work nearly as well as it looks like it should? Why?
Electronic – arduino – have to solder header pins
arduinoheaderpins
Related Solutions
I suspect that most shield designers either don't think of it or run out of time. When I've made shields (for personal projects), I've had intentions at the start of adding other features, but by the time everything is laid out, I just think, "OK, this will work. Maybe I'll add that other stuff on the next rev."
Adding blank holes for hacking on extra stuff is a great idea. Given that most (all?) of the shields on Sparkfun are open hardware, why don't you make an improved version? I suspect that the Sparkfun folks would be delighted to accept your improvements.
I got TTL serial receive on the iPhone working yesterday. Instead of you using minicom to check the serial connection I issued the following command: cat /dev/tty.iap 9600 This displayed the output my Arduino was sending on the serial TX line. I also soldered a new dock connector (>.>) I used the pod breakout.
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Best Answer
Think about it mechanically - you have a straight row of pins and you insert them in slightly loose fitting holes (all in a line). Even if you hold them in place - can you be sure that one of the pins isn't fractionally bent in one direction different to the others. Think about this for a 3 pin header: -
Clearly the pin in the middle isn't touching the inside of the yellow hole until you put unreasonable amount of pressure on the connector. Please, no complaints about the colours.