A lot of my projects are getting to the point where I’m going to be flashing them with firmware once and then installing them to be never flashed again. This means soldering all the ICSP headers in seems a little silly, but I found a better solution.
Turns out the pogo pins sold by AdaFruit fit in female connectors, so I (carefully) pressed six into my USBtinyISP and bam; bed of nails programmer. You have to be very careful inserting them; I managed to destroy two pins in the process, so I’m dedicating a whole programmer with these pins, and switched to a spare for main development, because you don’t want to be swapping these in and out.
We love these little Pogo Pins, and specifically stock them because they can fit into breadboards, perfboards, and headers.
Pogo Pins (10 pack). Pogo pins are little spring-loaded contacts, very handy for making jigs, or making momentary (but electrically solid) contacts. We use them by the dozen for making programming and testing jigs but they’re handy also if say you want to JTAG program a board that you cant solder headers to – just shove these thin contacts into the programming cable and press it onto the contacts.
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I’m assuming that since the pogo pins will fit in the 2×3 header on the USBtinyISP, they’ll also fit into the 1×6 header on the USB-FTDI cable?