For the first time in about 7 years I decided to pickup soldering again. It went surprisingly well. I had a lot of fun doing it and it took far less time than I anticipated. I am far rustier than when I was doing it regularly, but the end-product was tested via a multimeter and confirmed to be working, so I can’t complain. Below you can see a few pictures of my work, from start to finish. How the Solder blobbed up, the basic mistakes I made and rectified. The dull solder balls I was able to get rid off as well as the solder bridge. After I was finally done I tested with a multimeter and confirmed each pin was electrically sound.

I had used too much solder for one of my GPIO pins and ended up needing to use a solder wick and extra flux as you can see in the pic below.

After I got the Solder back under control with flux and a solder wick, I was able to continue refining the pins that had the dull silver blobs over them which you can see below.

After I had all of the pins soldered and refined, I was happy enough to add a slight bit more flux and continue to make each pin less bulb-like and more volcanic in shape. This volcanic look that you can see on some of the smaller pins is typically what you should be aiming to create. You can see more of these volcanic looking pins below.

Once I was happy with the work I had done on all the GPIO pins, I weeded back the dull silver-bulb pins. Now that the pins were firmly and correctly in place, I wiped down my work surface and cleared the table so that I could comfortably use a Multimeter to test each individual GPIO pin.

I use a cheap multimeter that I found on amazon, but it worked very reliably. I am rather happy with the results and now I am using the Raspberry Pi Zero on a hardware forensics lab which I will post about once I complete the lab.