Hi,
I bought an adafruit metro and the headers were SMD, not thru-hole. I liked it, since it allowed the board bottom to be smooth.
But after two days of using it? the headers sagged like wet clay.
So I refunded it to amazon and I am thinkig of buying a new one.
Is there a difference in durability between the SMD and thru-hole headers?
Thanks!
Installation & Troubleshooting
For problems with Arduino itself, NOT your project
Please post in the correct section.
You can buy them on ebay or from a good electronics supply house like digikey.
The SMD headers will make a less durable connection to the board, and will be more likely to destroy the board in the event of abuse: things that would just bend (or break) a through-hole pin, allowing it to be unbent or easily replaced, with an SMD header would rip the pad off of the circuit board, making repair very difficult.
They're available at several price/quality points, like normal pin header, and some of the low-quality ones (especially female header) are really bad, as you discovered.
They are also harder to solder than they look - I had an embarrassingly high rate of cold solder joints when I was using it.