“Yes, we need a proto board for the Pico. I'm generally very happy with Pimoroni products, so please see this more as suggestions for improvement. It's clear the board was designed to be roughly the same size as the Pico, and that's part of the problem.
First, once the female headers have been soldered on, any prototyping must be done underneath the Pico. If all of the parts can fit there, fine. But the connections to each pin only extend to the next inside pin rather than to the halfway point (i.e., only one connection), so if the pin is meant to have an outside connection or to a component, it can't be done without creating solder bridges between pads or some other "solder-hack".
Secondly, as those pin connections are inside -- rather than outside -- the Pico's pins, you can't solder male headers to them except from the underside. I've used angled headers (see attached photo) but it's very much less than ideal as now with cables attached the Pico has a very large footprint, at least 50mm wide. It's either that or very tall. And with headers attached this has used up the only connections to the pins, so there's no "proto" left, it's just a big socket.
Finally, there are no mounting holes, so there's no way to attach the proto board to anything without drilling out some of the pin holes on the underside of the board, which means once the Pico is in the socket the mounting holes aren't accessible. Mounting holes need to be outside the extent of the Pico.
In summary, an improved board would have each pin's connections running to the middle of the board (providing multiple connections to each pin so prototyping is possible), at least one access hole on the outside of the Pico rather than inside for use with headers, and two or four mounting holes. The board would be slightly larger but would be much more useful.”
“I haven't used the Pico Proto yet, but it looks great. I got it because I have a Pico project in mind, and I need it to be as absolutely flat as possible. This proto board will do that mighty well.”
