Maybe I’m doing this wrong, but I can’t figure out a better way to work.
I prototype with a breadboard before soldering on headers and then soldering or wirewrapping for “production”. For prototyping, I pin the PCB (SAMD21 in this case) to the breadboard with rows of headers on either side to keep it stable.
The SAMD21 Pro RF isn’t amenable to that approach. The two rows of ground pins make the board so wide it doesn’t fit the standard breadboard with space for pins to the sides to make other connections. The fact that the signal-pin and ground-pin rows are adjacent precludes using a 2x10 header with pin sockets above the board – the breadboard would ground all the pins.
It would seem that the only way to work with the SAMD board is to solder in 2x10 headers on each side and use perfboard as a base.
I considered soldering 1x10 short and 1x10 long headers with pin sockets above the board on each side. That way I could seat the PCB on the breadboard (just the long signal pins connecting to the board), prototype with the sockets on the top of the PCB, then mount and point-to-point solder or wirewrap in perfboard. But I couldn’t find pairs of 1x10’s to meet those specs.
How do others with SAMD21’s prototype and then finalize their circuits?