Treedix Breakout Board for Raspberry PI PICO Flexible PCB Shield Board Terminal Block Shield with Pin Header

Since I was planning on doing some Pico projects I thought the terminal block would be a good idea. I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the parts even though they looked very small compared to what I was used to back in my working days. Luckily I have a fine tip soldering iron and a bunch of really good very fine solderwire. I hadn't soldered up headers in quite a while so I was pleased with myself as well. It makes a very nice tidy piece of kit. You will need a 2mm straight blade screwdriver for the terminal block screws as well. Since I mostly work with Raspberry Pis, I will have to get some M2 hardware for standoffs but that's not a problem as long as I use it on a non-conducting surface.

I'm not great at soldering, so these make a great substitute where I'm not worrying about breadboarding wires pulling off the pins. It makes the footprint of the pico bigger if you're tight for space in a project box, but then I just use a bigger box.

The kit comes unassembled. The ad said 'welded' which I assume got lost in translation from Chinese to English. So you will need to solder the components together. My concern is the terminal blocks are VERY small and require a tiny flat head screwdriver. I tried to back out a terminal screw to connect a 16 AWG wire and the screw internally seperated from the terminal. So now Pin 5 won't tighten or loosen making the pin useless. Beware of this when connecting wires.

Permets une utilisation rapide du Adafruit Pico.

Glad to see I'm not the only one that didn't read the whole description or check past the first couple of pictures. I didn't anticipate assembling this, I was hoping to just take it out of the box and wire it into a test fixture immediately. I already have proto boards, headers, and terminal blocks to make this on my own. I was pleased to find that the terminal blocks do indeed have traces to the pins. Jumping between the headers to the terminal blocks is always a pain, whether you do it with tiny jumpers or just a solder blob across the pads. Having that taken care of makes this worth the price in my opinion. Tiny mechanisms like the terminal block screws are always delicate, and if you have to jam a screwdriver in to turn it then you'll likely break them. If you don't have one of those little tools for turning potentiometers or one of those electronics repair kits with all the different tiny screwdriver heads, you may want to get one. I had to use one of the smallest flathead bits in mine to turn the terminal block screws without scraping the plastic. It's easier to use the right tool than it is to desolder and replace the whole half row of terminal blocks if you break one.