Uh-oh! Short detected after soldering Pico WiFi Shim

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2021-07-06 by Stoaty

Oh dear, it was all going so well!

I was following the tutorial for installing the Pico WiFi Shim, and found it difficult to solder the three pins that are close together - the ones you need a little bit of solid-core wire to link them.

I believe I have a short between the shim and the Pico where solder has bled through, but wanted to confirm, should the pins indicated in red share a connection? or have I borked it?

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2021-07-06 by Stoaty

(I should mention that the short testing produced the same results on the other side of the board)

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Posted at 2021-07-06 by @gfwilliams

Uh-oh - no, the rightmost pin there is GND, leftmost is 3.3v - so they're definitely not expected to be a short!

Otherwise your soldering looks pretty neat as well.

All I can suggest is to put the soldering iron over both those pads (ideally all 3) and see if you can pull the shim very slightly away on the rear, then let everything cool down. Having a slight extra gap in there might help to get rid of the short.

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Posted at 2021-07-06 by Stoaty

Bugger, never mind! 😆

OK, I'll stick the fat soldering tip on and give it a try!

Thanks for getting back to me so fast! I'll post up my results.

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Posted at 2021-07-06 by Stoaty

Well, something I did while jostling it about did the trick - although I lifted the pad on the middle pin! Hopefully it's salvageable, will try my best to fix the trace!

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Posted at 2021-07-06 by Stoaty

I DID IT!

There was a tiny nub left under the lifted pad that I anchored a tiny wire to using solder paste, and then the bit of flappy trace on the other side of the pad was just able to be soldered to, it looks like a mess but I can happily say I managed to upload the firmware and run your example code!

When I get to glueing it all down (yep, gonna get the UV-cure resin out!) I'll send a picture for fun so you can see just how much I butchered my lovely little shim! 😭 haha

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Posted at 2021-07-06 by Stoaty

Little jumper lead I added is highlighted in yellow. 🙈

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Posted at 2021-07-06 by Stoaty

I think I can safely say this is the tiniest bit of soldering I've ever done!
All glued up now, and still works when I plug it back in.

>
>
 ____                 _
|  __|___ ___ ___ _ _|_|___ ___
|  __|_ -| . |  _| | | |   | . |
|____|___|  _|_| |___|_|_|_|___|
         |_| espruino.com
 2v09 (c) 2021 G.Williams
>
Connecting to WiFi
Connected
Response:  httpCRs: { "hdrs": true,
  "headers": {
    "Date": "Tue, 06 Jul 2021 16:53:51 GMT",
    "Server": "Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu)",
    "Last-Modified": "Fri, 15 Nov 2013 15:42:26 GMT",
    "ETag": "\"d-4eb390b887c80\"",
    "Accept-Ranges": "bytes",
    "Content-Length": "13",
    "Connection": "close",
    "Content-Type": "text/plain"
   },
  "cRcv": 0,
  "httpVersion": "1.1",
  "statusCode": "200",
  "statusMessage": "OK"
 }
--->Hello World!
> 

I'm chuffed to bits. Many thanks again for the help Gordon!

Now I will be able to make my IR remote control do more than just control the media buttons on my PC :-)

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Posted at 2021-07-07 by @gfwilliams

That's great! Glad you got it working - that is some extremely tiny soldering there!