Soldering Pins to the LCD Panel Character Panel
The first step in preparing the LCD panel is to solder a strip of header pins to the circuit board that holds the panel. You will need the kit of parts, a side cutter and a soldering station.
The entire assembly and test process is divided into the following steps.
Unpack the LCD kit
The LCD kit from Adafruit contains an LCD panel mounted on a circuit board, a 32 pin section of header pins, and a 10k potentiometer.
Trim the header
Use your side cutters to carefully cut the header into a segment that has 16 pins. If your side cutters are sharp, you should be able break the header strip cleanly at the indentation between two pins.
If you are unlucky, you may break the plastic around the end pin. Don't give up. The plastic is only necessary to hold the pin while you solder it to the board. You can still use the header strip as long as the solder pin at the end is aligned with the hole on the circuit board and is held at the same height (relative to the plane of the board) as the other pins.
Solder the header
Insert the header so that the short end of the pins pass through the circuit board.
Solder the header from the top.
