Soldering the headers

You'll be divided up into groups, each with their own soldering iron and some basic tools.

We'll need to solder pin headers to our microcontroller, and wires to each of our keyboard switches.

The microcontroller

In this project we'll be using (a tiny!) microcontroller based on the RP2040 chip by Raspberry Pi. Their default board is a bit big for this project though, so we use a tiny board with the same chip on it. The XIAO RP2040.

To make it a bit easier on ourselves (it'll be hard enough already 😃) we'll start by soldering headers onto our board.

These are tiny pins we can plug things into later.

Start by making sure you've got 2 rows of 7 pins. Then we'll fit these onto our board, and then stick this upside down onto a breadboard.

Once the board and headers are firmly in their place we'll solder all 14 pins. I'll come by to get everyone started, but make sure to have a look at this short guide.

Next up installing the required software, and making an LED blink!