I got a SparkFun Qwiic SHIM for Raspberry Pi ( DEV-15794) and it isn’t working at all…
Has anyone ever used one of these? The “friction fit” doesn’t seem to have any friction at all. Sitting over the pins, it just wiggles at will, and the power lights on my QWIIC modules are turning on and off, etc… It even has caused the PI to reboot twice… What am I missing? When I ordered this, I kind of expected a spring-type interface or something, but no such luck!
There are just “thru-holes” of the type I’d normally solder, and you put them over the headers, but they just rattle around and occasionally make contact. If I intentionally torque the little board crooked, it seems to make some contact, but even then, I’m not getting anything on the i2cdetect command.
I’m thinking maybe I just need to solder this to some arduino style headers, so that I can plug the entire header in and have a solid connection while still being able to stack over it, but I’d love to hear someone else’s experience…
Can you provide a close up of the board connected to the pi?
Yep… Still and video attached. In this case, I’m working on an old original RPi, because the fit was the same on the PI4 and I thought I’d limit my possibility of shorting something out on a piece of hardware I cared more about until I get this thing worked out!
Forum wouldn’t let me upload a small video clip, so I put it here: https://youtu.be/BA6Pae5n-r0
Thanks for any help you can give me!
The holes in this product were designed off of static measurements but it is possible that manufacturing tolerances are causing the gaps. One recommendation would be to fill the PTH holes with solder and then remove it with suction or the [slap method. That will add a small layer of solder that can make the joint a bit more snug. If all else fails, please feel free to use the [returns policy to request a replacement.](Return Policy - SparkFun Electronics)](https://www.sparkfun.com/news/802)
Thanks… That doesn’t sound like it would give me much confidence on the connection it would make… I think I’ll just find some 2 by “X” stackable headers and permanently solder one of these things on and use it that way. I question “manufacturing tolerances” because I have 3 of these, and have tried them on 2 different PIs with the same results, so as cool of a thought as it is, I question the reliability if it were to ever work… Still, for the buck I paid, it’s a useful thing to have around and will presumably work great when soldered to the header!
… no harm, no foul! Thanks for the quick response and confirmation that I was at least using these as designed…
