Recently, I’ve been planning to play around a bit with the I2C protocol. For debugging purposes, I wanted a simple board to debug what is happening on the bus. This PCF8574 breakout board seemed like a good fit.
It can drive 8 signals just by writing 1 byte to it on the bus, and has 3 jumpers for address selection. It has a strong drain, making it possible to directly run LEDs from it. I used it with a breadboard to visualise the first and last 2 bits, because I ran out of LEDs.
This monstrosity made me realise the headers were the wrong way around for convenient use, so I made the decision to desolder the row of headers and put them on the bottom. This turned out quite difficult, I resorted to cutting the headers and desoldering them individually.
Even this way, the solder pump was required quite a lot, and the process was violent enough to ruin 2 of the connections. If anyone has advice on how to do this, I am all ear. After adding the new header, I decided to try fixing it with some short cables in order not to waste a good board. This was my first time doing it, and it was quite a struggle. Maybe this is easier with solid core cable? Those tiny wires look like a short waiting to happen.
Connecting everything up, it looks a lot better than the first version, and it seems to work perfectly. It does feel cool, my first time fixing a broken (by myself) board.
