Programming Clip

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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:

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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':

serial-programming_sml.jpg (37.05 KiB) Viewed 11684 times

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.

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You can also purchase a hand held serial programming tool via Aliexpress. Note the Blue USB UART board is sold separately.

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You can buy them with 3, 4 or more pins. I like to use a 3 pin (Rx, Tx, GND) as I can supply power via other means.

programmer-demo.jpg (51.04 KiB) Viewed 11626 times

An action shot