Anyone know of a good alternative to 2.54MM throughhole headers ?
Header pins are great for development, but in production I don’t really care to populate the headers (e.g. JTAG)
MillMax pogo pins are nice but it usually requires some form of jig to hold it in place over the board (i.e. you can’t really do a handsfree operation with just the connector)
Are there any connectors out there which are easy enough to use for both dev and production and don’t require a large amount of realestate on the board?
we used to solder in the 2.54 headers for the JTAG in production boards.
however, recently we stopped soldering them in. when it comes time to program the board we just push the 2.54 header in the board and tilt it slightly, then while keeping the side pressure on the header with your finger hit the program button, aver it verifies, power down & pull the header out. we have had no issues with all our boards made this way.
after all, why put a header in a board that is only going to be used once.
You could put pads that you then make contact with. If you are familiar with the bed-of-nail test fixture, imagine a greatly simplified version.
I’ve also used a clothespin with a set of salvaged spring contacts from an edge connector.
Or you you could just use an edge connector directly.
If you have the right type of chip (and don’t need any fintering or current limiting between the header and the chip) you can get chip clips that grab directly onto the chip leads. They have them for DIP, SOIC and one other that I forget.
I’d be interested in something like this as well. On some of my smaller boards, even the 2x3 .1" header for AVR-ISP is hard to fit in. I would love to find something that was easy to use that was half that pitch.
Hey, I actually just used a IC clip recently on a new product to minimize the necessary conact pins. This clip is used to reprogram the IC on the board. It uses a 3M SOIC clip.
As you can see, this basically took the the equiv space of about half an SOIC-8 chip. I added the rubber o-rings on the bottom side to make it touch the pins better.
This is a really inexpenisve tool for being able to easily reprogram the device. Now if only they made an SSOP clip. I didn’t want to use the primary IO pins for programming the uC since it will only need to be done once.
FYI this is for a small power supply that I hope to be bring to the market soon.
seulater:
we used to solder in the 2.54 headers for the JTAG in production boards.
however, recently we stopped soldering them in. when it comes time to program the board we just push the 2.54 header in the board and tilt it slightly, then while keeping the side pressure on the header with your finger hit the program button, aver it verifies, power down & pull the header out. we have had no issues with all our boards made this way.
after all, why put a header in a board that is only going to be used once.
We also use this method with 100% succes in the lab. Even our 100% software guys, those with two left hands :lol:, find it easy.
We used to use the header-tilt method, but recently we’ve been moving to Pogo pins, just because over time, the header pins get more and more bent, and work less well.
I like mooreaa’s approach! I’ve thought of doing something similar “by hand” (with a clothespin / binder clip and very carefully placed contacts), nice to see that the approach works.
wiml, I was originally gonna try it as you described, but it would be much too difficult to get the exact pins positioned right. For the trouble, a 12 dollar part solved our problem and it easily lets us have as many “programmer” clips as we need.
