Programming Clip
Posted: Fri Jan 14, 2022 5:44 pm
On most of my PCB's that I create, if it's going to be a end user programmed, I might place a USB UART, like a CP2102 on there, but as a backup, I will place a 3 pin [Rx-Tx-GND] 1.27mm pin-header onto the board, along with two 0402 0 ohm jumpers, so I can quickly isolate the CP2102 UART from the ESP32 MCU serial pins:
I had another search a few weeks ago, and BINGO - I hit the mother load with 'Programming Clip': There isn't much space when between the pins! It only took 13 days to arrive. Yay, no more soldering on a 1.27mm female pin-header connector.
Sometimes I might be the only one thats going to use the board, so I might just go with the small 1.27mm connector and save the board space and cost of the UART. It's a pain though to have a small 1.27mm female connector on the board. They are a bit fragile due to it's small size. I made up a small corresponding 1.27mm male 3-pin connector to program the board using an external USB serial cable. I have purchased some 0.5mm wide pogo pins so as to make up my own programming jig and have searched Aliexpress looking for a pre-made tool, but I was using the wrong search term.I had another search a few weeks ago, and BINGO - I hit the mother load with 'Programming Clip': There isn't much space when between the pins! It only took 13 days to arrive. Yay, no more soldering on a 1.27mm female pin-header connector.