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Solder a 3 pin dupont header to the wires, so you can easily make contact with all contacts (with 1 hand :D)

PCBite makes probes which apply pressure to pads

If you want a cheap, easy, no thought solution then use a chip clip to space the wires where you want them so you can just use it with one hand.

th-cam.com/video/MpwVl5LJBy8/w-d-xo.html

Also, just buy pcb bites. Not only flashing, debugging becomes a lot easier. No need for a fully automated solution if you are not doing 100s of these boards.

No suggestions. This is peak process efficiency

3d print a jig that holds your board in place and has a manually toggle clamp. place an end effector on the toggle clamp that has spring loaded pogo pins. when you lower the toggle clam onto the board the pogo pins will be pressed against your bootloader/debug pins for programming.

No effort november solution: a wooden clothes peg three holes with small nails. TADA 🎉

Spider holders that are used for microSD card recovery might be convenient (for other things too). Or something like a DuPont 1x3 male connector with *circumsized* ends, to hold it conveniently

You can do simple lever that hold probes/pins in place by it's own weight

Bind the burn button to the space bar, and press that with your foot 😂

Somewhat more elaborate solution that is easy to adapt to more or less any board: u can make a grid of n by n pogo pins with pin spacing being an even multiple of your layout tools snap to grid size with somewhay reasonable travel distance with some adreasing circuitry and a lot of broken out dupont headers. Then you can just 3d print or laser or cnc or whatever a mask with holes for the pins in the grid that need to get to the board and an alignment edge for the board. Then just press down on the assembly. The pins covered by the mask will be pushed down out of.the way and the ones that aren't covered by the mask will go through the mask and reliably contact the test points in the pcb. If you wanna be extra fancy you can add a locking mechanism for pressing down more reproducibly and.without having to hild the.board down.

Just use Sensepeek PCBite Probes..Just perfect for exactly this Work;)

What is the spacing of the pins? I can model and 3D print you a jig for you to use for this, I've done this exact thing myself manually for many moons, and this video gave me the idea to end finger cramps and nose-mouse-pressing once and for all! Happy no effort November (spiritually)!

if you want i will redesign the whole board

pogo pins on a PCB with dummy headers that grab onto the other headers on the board being programmed to provide both holding tension and alignment.

Just 3d print a weighted jig to hold the wires to the pins! Use AVA's screw holes to temporarily mount it!

you can use "tag connect" footprint and connector for programming the bootloader

No effort, i make hot glue negative prints and melt the wires into them. Now I just need to hold the hot glue blob that neatly slots in.

3d print a jig, pogo pins in the right spots, and a hinge on top for compression.

As others have mentioned - TAGconnect is really cool, a bit expensive, but you only need one cable. Also gives you an option to use SWD/JTAG directly during development, instead of bootloaders, which is very likely faster and more convenient. And on top of that you can do debugging (Ozone, VSCode, etc), access any memory/registers contents and output logs via RTT.

I'd probably find a header with long pins(like the kind for wire wrap), and bend it so it acts like pogo pins.

How about making a tiny 3d printed jig for you wires with like needles/gpio headers at the front so it gets easier every time.

Haha couple months ago i was measuring something on my scope and i needed a third hand to click trigger. I put my Mouse on the floor and triggered scope with my foot.

i think this is probably already said but pogo pin glued/friction fitted on a 3d printed jig, should be relatively low effort with like 10 min in aliexpress, 20 min of cad, 1 hour of waiting the print and 20 min of soldering,

I love your commitment towards this dumb process. For the next flight computer. Please improve this :D

Just like that elon has inspired folks to do shit nasa could never come up with for fun

I normally just 3D print a jig. On that jig I have a way to permanently attach a little homemade perfboard pin to pogo pin adapter, and a way to temporarily clip the target board. Typically, that’s just some alignment posts and a couple of binder clips with kapton tape on them!

Love this! If you change the pads on the PCB to be through hole, you can stick some wire through it and it should hold good enough on its own

Use auto clicker to delay the mouse click 5s

You could design a universal pogo pin header, which will be universal for all MCUs 🙂

no offence, but you somewhat look like elon musk

you can just solder these cables on a 3 header pin strip and press this thing on the board with one hand, maybe you'll need to bend the pins a bit to make the contact, but i think will work just fine

If the spacing on those test points is right, grab a servo header pin strip, solder the wires to the 3 pins, and at least you have a single unit to hold against the pads.

You know "TagConnect" ? ** saw the same comment 100x

No effort November released in December is just exemplarily execution of the theme 👏

There's like a ton of things that could be done quick to make this easy. pogo pins. in wood, perf board, quick 3d print if you have printer. I've even done extra board blank drilled out since it has the right spacings alrady. Solder to the pads then desolder them. grab a friend to push the button? next time add through hole pins at 0.1" and solder pins to a connector...but fine no effort november i guess.

This is interesting content! Love the problems I can understand and then see comments section ideas

Love this. I have been in similar situations before

For small runs, I like to 3d print a "tray" for the board with holes for pogo pins. I solder wires to the pogo pins then super glue them into the holes in the print.

You could do it with JLCPCB for very little cost and very little time

Kapton tape the leads down?

Regarding the generating of pick and place files: I mostly use JLCPCB for assembly, and there's a KiCad plugin called Fabrication Toolkit that simplifies this whole process to one click! The standard footprint libraries within KiCad don't completely match with JLCPCB's, so you'll have to correct the rotation in their web UI while ordering, but it's simple and fast enough. With that solved, most of my effort when designing for assembly is focused on finding the correct parts and tagging them in the schematic with the correct LCSC ID.

Just 3D print a jig that screws on to the board and imbed some Pogo pins on it to keep the pressure on it. Hell, you don't even have to screw it on the board. The print could just hold the wires in alignment for you so you don't need to be as precise with your fingers.

oh my god just get a pcbite

You could have just soldered all three wires to a header pin stack, and then you only need 1 hand to apply pressure, since the spacing is decided by the header pins, which are held in by plastic.

Aren't there programming sockets where you put the processor into a gripper that interfaces it for programming before you solder them to the board? Or, chose a different processor alltogether that Just uses a serial port to Programm itself? Maybe go into the design decisions a bit more because using easy eda one can design and order such a programming piggy back board in an hour or so :'D

I do this all the time when hacking stuff to take it out of the cloud. Buy some pogo pins and design a 3d printed fixture. Will cost you just a few bucks and maybe an hour of your time. Good luck!

aren't there plugs with spring-loaded pins? I don't know what they're called. But then you would only need one hand

Typical Engineering Menace lol