Cooler in QA

A quick follow-up to my last post, Just Chillin', where I was fitting a cooler to a cluster of Raspberry Pis. After I published that one, I got an email asking me to double-check a couple of things before calling it done — specifically the orientation of the Pis and whether the GPIO pins had been soldered properly to the correct pads.

Fair point. Orientation is the kind of thing that's embarrassingly easy to get wrong when you're working quickly, and a missoldered GPIO pin can cause all sorts of grief that's annoying to debug after the fact. So I went back in and had a proper look.

The Checks

First up: orientation. Each Pi needs to be seated the right way round — get that wrong and you're not just looking at a non-booting board, you could be doing actual damage. I went through each one carefully.

Second: the GPIO pins themselves. I checked that each one was soldered cleanly to its correct pad — no cold joints, no bridges, nothing shifted. The kind of thing that looks fine at a glance but bites you later.

Here's the topside:

And the backside:

Everything looks solid. Orientations are correct, the solder joints are clean, and the GPIO pins are on the right pads.

QA passed.