It's been a while!

I honestly can't remember the last time I soldered anything.  We did some hardware work at Uni in 1993, but it was all breadboard based. So, it's likely it was in the late 1980's!

Having bought a few components that require soldering I thought it best to start on something easy (and cheap).  The current wiring on the LCD panel was OK (see previous post), but was definitely in need of improvement.

Individual jumper wires have a habit of coming loose and there will be plenty of vibration on the Daytona to help them along their way.  Multiple jumpers together in a header are much harder to dislodge, and it's likely that the whole lot will either be connected, or not, making troubleshooting a bit easier.

Technobotsonline sell crimp headers in various sizes, right up to 1x16 way, which fits the pins on the LCD just fine.  Removing the individual housings is a bit fiddly, but once you get the hang of it and you decide that you have enough singles as spares now so the rest don't need to survive!
Fitting the 16 way was easy:

As were the smaller ones for the GPIO, power and ground pins at the breadboard:

Much tidier, but the final problem was pin 3 on the HD44780 is contrast.  Usually one would use a pot for that, but I don't need to be able to adjust the contrast, I just want some!  As mentioned in the previous post, a 3K3 Ω resistor does the job.  A bit of youtubeing (Is that a verb yet? It is a Google brand so it should be) turned up a couple of simple enough looking techniques for an inline resistor, which is also described well here. 

Time to warm up the soldering iron.

Not bad for a first attempt!

Heatshrink fitted and ready to go.

The finished article in place and working.

I'm still not confident in my soldering abilities, so I will be doing lots more practice before I move onto the GPS header pins. Next up will be a mini power distribution rail based on vero board - lots of pins to solder there.

Overall I think we can call my first bit of soldering in 20 years a success!