Soldering the GPIO header onto my new Raspberry Pi Zero

I picked up a Raspberry Pi Zero and a case kit that included the GPIO header (along with a power cable and some other nifty adapters). This is a really cool little computer that only has 512 MB of RAM, but it's still plenty capable. It's my favorite Pi so far because it's a legit Linux machine, that's very inexpensive ($15 at my local Microcenter + $18 case), but still very powerful and very useful. I only run it in headless/gui-less mode, and I only interact with it over WiFi and SSH, so I really don't tax it at all. It is a bit limited in that it runs the 32-bit Raspberry OS as opposed to the 64-bit version that my full-blown Raspberry Pi 4 runs. But digressing, the GPIO header required soldering, so this turned into my first soldering project in a long time!..

After the fact, not the cleanest soldering job, but I think I've gotten every pin soldered, and don't think I've got any shorts..

and here it is securely inside its case with the newly soldered GPIO header poking out...

Finally, I fired up SSH and the Python repl, and ran a simple LED test to check the GPIO pins, and the LED lit up!..

Although admittedly I initially connected the LED to GPIO pin #2 and it didn't work, but pin #14 did work so I may have to take it back apart and check the soldering on #2 (update: after some digging, I found out that pin #2 is a special pin that can't be used like the other more general purpose pins, so all good!). I did check it against a fan that I plugged into the 5v pin and to a ground ping and that worked fine too. Not bad for not having soldered in a long time!

Oh, and I also added this little Pi Zero to my home VPN with no problems.