The Magic of Pogo Pins: Building a Custom Programming Fixture!

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If you’ve ever found yourself building custom circuit boards in appreciable quantities, you’ve probably been faced with a dilemma: how do you program the components and verify board functionality? Putting a connector on the board adds size, cost, and complexity. Soldering on wires is messy and time consuming. And probing a board by hand is tedious and error prone. Is there a better way?

The answer is the mighty pogo pin! Pogo pins are electrical contacts that consist of a fixed body and a plunger that is pushed out from the body by a spring. Conductivity is maintained throughout the plunger’s stroke, making pogo pins great for connecting two components with inconsistent spacing.

In this video, I start by giving a brief overview of pogo pins. I then detail the design, build, and testing of a pogo pin programming fixture. This board contains a number of pogo pins that contact exposed pads on a separated circuit board - the one I’m trying to program and test - in order to connect a debug probe, power the board, and test out basic functionality. This programming fixture requires no connector on the target PCB, only exposed areas of copper for the pogo pins to touch. Because of this, no size or cost is added to the target circuit boards, making this the most economical way to program and test a moderate quantity of circuit boards!

Check out these previous videos where I talk about my tile lights project in more detail:

Introduction to the smart LED tile backsplash project:    • LEDs, Microcontrollers, and Microphon...  
Programming the PY32 for the tile backsplash project:    • Programming the Smart Backsplash - Wr...  
Building a bigger prototype of the backsplash:    • Making My Tile Backsplash Into a Touc...  

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:50 What are pogo pins?
04:00 Designing the fixture PCB
08:13 Building the fixture
10:12 Testing the fixture
13:50 The plan: making an automated test apparatus