Help with the expansion board prototyping area.

[undeadpony]

To anyone who has used the prototyping sections of the expansion board, could you offer some tips on how you connected items to the WiPy pins? Is the only option to solder pins to the proto section and use jumper wires from them to the GPIO? I've only done a couple of very simple circuit designs by myself. I also don't consider myself particularly creative and I usually need examples from something conceptually similar to get started.

I mentioned in another post that I'm working on a project where the WiPy is going to control a stepper motor via a Pololu A4988 chip. Every waking moment this weekend has been spent working on this and I'm at the point where I need to make the hardware easier to transport. All the connections between the A4988 and expansion board are currently with a variety of female-to-male jumper cables. To keep it simple I'm using 2 lipo batteries for now, one for the expansion board and the other connects to the A4988 vmot & gnd pins (with an on/off switch inline). I have the logic vin /gnd for A4988 coming from the WiPy 3v3/gnd pins. The other pins used on the WiPy (with the A4988 pin name in parentheses) are: GP23(enable), GP24(reset), GP12(sleep), GP13(dir), GP14(step). That covers everything except the motor which is just a 4 pin connector right to the A4988.

If anyone has any photos with the proto sections in use or ideas you'd be willing to share I would be super grateful.