What is the best way to connect to the bottom digital pins on T3.0?

[Sober Steve]

I'm going to be connecting my teensy 3.0 to a double sided protoboard via headers. The problem is, is that I need to use the digital pins that are on the bottom side of the teensy (in the middle of the board). I guess I could flip the teensy upside down and have the bottom facing upward which would allow me to directly solder wire to the points, but I am curious to know if there are more formatted ways of doing this?

Looking forward to a response.

Cheers

 

[Nantonos]

The part that you need is Samtec TSM-107-04-T-DV which is a surface mount connector. As used on this breakout board and also this one. You can get them at various vendors such as digikey. (more details).

 

[Sober Steve]

Great, I knew there would be a better way. Thanks for the info!

 

[MichaelMeissner]

There is a storefront on tindie.com that sells breakout boards to do this. I've bought them, but I haven't yet tackled the soldering, etc:

• Teensy 3.0 breakout Mark II: https://www.tindie.com/products/loglow/teensy-30-breakout-mark-ii/ -- this looks complete, and it includes all of the pins needed. The downside is it adds 0.1" on either side, which might be problematical on perfboards that have less than 5 rows of pins to attach the Teensy to.;
• Teensy 3.0 mini-breakout: https://www.tindie.com/products/loglow/teensy-30-mini-breakout/ -- I believe you need to get longer headers for this. This one doesn't add to the width of the Teensy.

Whoops, I didn't notice Nantonos had links for the breakout boards.

 

[Nantonos]

Steve, happy to help. It's one of those things that is hard to search for without the exact phrase.

Whoops, I didn't notice Nantonos had links for the breakout boards.

At least you recognised there were links I'm used to old-school inline hyperlinking and it seems that increasingly, unless people see a 'click here' button or the actual in-your-face URL, they don't even notice there are links there.
The commentary you added about each one was also helpful for choosing between them.

Must remember not to assume people understand hypertext.

 

[PaulStoffregen]

I've never really done much customization on this forum, other than setting up anti-spam measures and relaxing settings for attachments. We installed it quickly, after the Teensy 3.0 Kickstarter was done, but while a LOT of work remained, so there's just never been enough time to really polish things nicely.

Someday I'm going to learn more about how its templates work and integrate it into the PJRC site better (and do a lot of much-needed overhaul on the site itself). One of the things I've never liked it how the unclicked links aren't the normal bright blue. They do sort of blend into the rest of the page, being the same color as the bars above each message. I also *really* want to customize the new thread page with posting guidelines, mainly about posting enough information in their questions....

If only there were many more hours in every day!

 

[Constantin]

Hi Paul,

If I may make a suggestion, I highly recommend the use of CSS for common web-site setups like font types, hypertext link colors and so on.

Makes it so easy to have a great uniform look, and once you grow tired of it, you only have to change a few lines to redo the whole web site. Very compact, uses almost no disk space, and if you want to customize a section if your site to be different, that is possible too.

 

[Nantonos]

In the style included by http://forum.pjrc.com/css.php?style...ulletin-chrome.css,vbulletin-formcontrols.css,

/* Line 1293 */
body a
{
  color: #417394;
}

change the color to the RGB triple you want. For example to get a contrasting orange link, force link underling, but only inside posts, add this to the end of the stylesheet:

blockquote.postcontent a
{
  color:#fba00e;
  text-decoration: underline
}

(Sorry for the off topic)

 

[Nantonos]

If I may make a suggestion, I highly recommend the use of CSS for common web-site setups like font types, hypertext link colors and so on.

Good suggestion, but the forum site already makes extensive use of CSS. It might benefit from a little tweaking. Agree on using it for the main site too (I understand Robin is working on this).

 

[KSum]

Pardon the seemingly obvious question, but on those pin headers, do you flip the board over and solder them to the pads,
or just plug it into the board and set the teensy down on top of it? (never dealt with connecting to pads before.)

 

[KurtE]

When I use them with my adapter boards, I solder the pin headers to the bottom pads.

Kurt

 

[KSum]

How tricky is that getting them to stay straight until you have the first one or two soldered on?

 

[Constantin]

If you're talking about the existing pin holes in the teensy, one easy way to make your job easier is to plug the intended strips into a perfboard, set the teensy into them, and then solder the whole assy together. As long as you put in the pins vertically, they'll remain so and hence tangential to the teensy surface.

For the pads on the underside, my recommendation would be to tack on two opposite corner pads before soldering the rest. Here too the use of a jig is possible but the pad solder headers (aka right angle or SMD pin header, 2x7) are relatively easy to keep in place.

Fwiw, I start with the rtc crystal, follow on with the SMD pin header, and finish with the though-holes.

 

[jimmayhugh]

Another option

 

[KSum]

Nicely done. Thanks.

 

[Nantonos]

Another option I have seen is to break the pin headers for the outside edges into two. Solder the two front halves. Then put the SMD pins in place and use a strip of pin socket across the pin headers and the SMD headers to hold them in place. Solder the SMD headers. Finally, solder in the back halves of the outer pin headers.