Another argument (actually two) for unsoldered headers would be the option to use short headers for size critical projects (short female and short male) or to use stacking headers.
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If you can easily test boards with unsoldered headers, then eliminating the header soldering step would seem to be pretty easy to accomplish. But then every situation is different, and I don’t know any thing about Particle production facilities.
particle seems to have already accepted the case of no soldered headers being just fine as is the case with some of the featherwings.
but in recent past particle users have asked for a different offering with the tracker, that is selling it without having to buy an electron also, but that took awhile to materialize. so particle made the decision to give the user what they may want in the tracker case. maybe they learned a lesson worth repeating in other cases.
What do you base that assertion on? I couldn'd find such a commitment so far.
I have broken out the comments from the original poll into a dedicated comment thread here.
i probably worded that wrong as what i meant was that since some of the new feather wing like tripler and doubler are already shipped with no soldered headers that particle has accepted that it is fine to ship like that, in those cases. and might be more inclined to consider it in this case.
Is it either/or, or can we have both? I don’t have time to put in the effort to solder unless I must.
But if I wanted a solderless, I could heat the pins and pull them out with pliers, then solder-suck each hole for a neat, solderless, particle.
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This is my position 100%. If soldering is required then I see no reason to use the "normal" mesh units instead of making a custom PCB that uses one of the SOMs.
Side note: Has there been any ETA update on the SOMs?
Unfortunately the B SOM does not support a third party SIM, so that’s a deal breaker for me. I like the SOM package, but it’s unusable for me. Since I have to use the Boron development board, I prefer the headers presoldered. That saves work for me in assembly.
@picsil, my understanding is that the SOM breaks out the SIM connections so you can include it on the base board.
@peekay123 Not without modifying the SOM unfortunately.
@rickkas7 commented on that here:
https://community.particle.io/t/gen3-som-give-us-some-hints/49462/5?u=picsil
the thing about the header extraction process is the times i’ve done it i’ve spent just about the same amount of time as it takes to solder headers. but that was using a heated solder sucker and the pin pull method might be quicker. hopefully they begin to offer both header and no header units.
I can’t describe how unbelievably useful it would be to have a Xenon without headers. I’m currently making a product where I have to remove the pin spacers to get the board height down to acceptable. That’s an error-prone time-consuming step. Then I have to manually solder the pins. The rest of the board is surface-mounted. Removing the headers would save me almost 25% of my production time and produce a more uniform and more reliable product. The pin holes are already castellated so this is a no-brainer to automatically surface-mount. My board even has a hole where the bottom ufl connector fits (although I could do without that connector as well).
I’d buy 100 tomorrow if they were available.
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I second that. Give users the freedom to select headers or no headers. In my application I have a problem to fit Xenon inside the enclosure as headers (plus sockets) are long and take a lot of space.
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