Soldering

[Siskris]

Stupidly, I put too much pressure on the small silver cylindrical object close to the power input and it came off. It is with much trepidation that I am thinking of soldering it back. It would appear to have a right way round, matching the black plastic bit at the bottom to the outline on the board.
I'm not an expert at soldering. Is there anything that I should be aware of before I start?

Woe

Came off in my hand.JPG (13.65 KiB) Viewed 1625 times

[Mortimer]

Plenty of photos of Raspberry Pi boards in the wiki. You should be able to determine the correct orientation from one of them.

[piglet]

If you have a decent power supply you may not need that bit. You're by no means the first person to break that part off. It's there to smooth out the input power - but a decent power supply will not necessarily need it.

Other people have reported no problems using the board without it.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... =28&t=7569
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... =63&t=9317
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... =28&t=4926

[dom]

Just leave it off. I've not noticed any ill effect after six months without it.

[Siskris]

Thank you, that's quite a relief. I thought for a while that having a Raspberry pi meant that I would have to learn even more skills than was intended.

[cashaw]

I know this is going to happen to me some day, I keep having to check myself when plugging in the USB power and finding my thumb resting against that cap for anchorage..

I'm waiting for the adafruit cases to become available and then avoid this problem once and for all..

[rotciv]

I believe it is a smoothing capacitor and it is soldered with the black painted crescent facing towards the outer edge of the pi board, so that when you are looking at the power socket furthest away from you and the network socket nearest to you, the lettering is the right way round to read,

[AndrewS]

http://elinux.org/RPi_Hardware#Capacitor_C6