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They have been around for a very long time. Fifty years ago (hard to believe it's been that long) I was designing and building production test gear for calculator production. Some of the board testers would run 25,000 cycles per day. Pogo pins can be used in a special socket that makes swapping out the pin very quick and easy.

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You should make a wine rack....

You do excellent work, sir. Thanks for the video and for sharing the project.

It would help me if you show pictures of what you are talking about, especially in the intro

Very Cool! Great Concept and design. Thanks for sharing all of your hard work. I must ask, if this project was sponsored by JLCPCB, why didn’t they offer to provide you PCB stencils? Since you’re using an ST Micro MCU, have you considered using TouchGFX for GUI design and development? I’m pushing 50 yoa and have only been getting into ECE in the past few years. So, if I ask rookie sounding questions, that’s probably why. Thanks again sharing your work. I see this becoming a very popular piece of test equipment which should cause a large community to form around it. The number and types of tests that can potentially be performed are huge. Good luck!

Im only using pogo pins is for the single connector to multiple items. They're kinda pricey

Interesting, I've been thinking about some way to help with measuring boards but rather for reverse-engineering… Did you think about interoperating with projects like OpenBoardData, surely these scripts can be converted and published there to help people repair them later ?

There are also much longer pins P100, P75, P50 which can be soldered through-hole and are much, much cheaper (couple bucks per hundred).

Which display are you using?

Ummm 50c per pogo pin is CRAZY !!! AliExpress have them in small quantities for less than 10c ea or 100 + under 5c ea....

Very nice project! Funny, I'm also working on a custom "universal" test/programming board at the moment! Maybe something we could bring together?

Very cool project! As I have several PCBs I do small scale production (like 30-50 in one batch mostly), it would be very valuable to have such an automation tool for testing to confirm that the PCBA manufacturer (which happens to be your sponsor for me as well, by the way) didn't mess something up. ;-) Few comments/suggestions: - I didn't fully understand how the test procedure works: I would expect that after the test has been completed the display shows a big green "PASSED" or red "FAILED" as a result. The text protocol is nice, but I would only look at it if a test has failed to get more details what possibly to rework. - At your interface to the PCB under test I saw I2C and SPI, but I was missing UART which I would consider important as well. - Flashing the firmware should directly be done with this tool as well providing a "firmware.bin" file on the SD card. I mainly use RP2040 micro controllers which do support SWD interface. So I hope flashing the firmware automatically can be implemented.

Pogos are illegal in the Philippines.

This popped up in my feed so thought I'd chime in. Have a look at @SuperHouseTV During the live streams we're busy working on a tester as well lol... However there is quite a difference in designs which is interesting to see. The way we decided to do the tester design for SH was more modular - and the DUT container is modular and can slip in and out of the tester. It also holds all the specifics for the DUT board - and also quite a lot bigger than your tester (needs to hands to pickup lol) By using that over a micro means we can use a raspberry pi to handle the logic, and if the main board doesn't have a way to test the board, it can be expanded on with the DUT container for the board. An example is for RS485 - main board doesn't have it, but DUT container does - and the PI can then do actual comms check as well. We use a PCI interface for that so easy to swap DUT containers - and then the main board which has a connector for a pi. It is more for the scale side of things vs small runs, but has more pins compared. Maybe for some ideas for you - is have a watch of a couple of the prev live streams and see how we resolved some of the issues. But you could do something similar. Instead of the limited header pins on top (which are also not easy to insert/remove) - you could use a PCI type connector. You should also add a relay - since you dont wanna power the DUT when inserted, only once ground is fully connected - you can blow some stuff that way...

This is really impressive. Thank you for going through all the details of the project. Also, the there is the free-dap firmware that can be used on an RP2040 that turn it into a usb SWD programmer. Maybe the firmware could be modified not to require USB? Probably a lot of work though. Alternatively, a Pi Zero can act as a SWD programmer directly from its GPIO. That would probably be the easiest option.

As someone with a small Electronics business, I use pogo pins to build test jigs regularly and even use them in some of the products I sell. You can get them with 1.2mm conical tips that mate with the standard .9mm through-holes. No need for exposing test points.

Great video! This looks great tool for small hardware projects. In my day job is do test automation for electronics and I can really see the value of this for the open source community. On the ISP side: For AVR based Boards there is the "Standalone AVR programmer" by adafruit might be interesting for your project. Keep up the great work. - Max

I'll just throw the thought that custom scripting can be a effort sink in programming, so using a third party library can be a saver. I've only actually used a lisp-like in an STM32F4 called lispBM

I really like this project. Did you consider JTAG also? From what if read you could use that to run tests in the ICs themselves.

from where did you get the display? Could you link it?

Why such a small current to determine resistance values or it it changed in code and I'm missing the point ? There are going to be noise issues with low current. I'm a bit puzzled by needing 10's of thousands of lines of code to be written. The HAL is available for interfacing standard devices and there is a lot of pre-written code from ST.

Great idea! I'd love a kit or a pre-assembled version. It would be really useful, especially compared to sending boards off to JLCPCB for assembly and getting five back when I only need one. I've been experimenting with this myself and trying to print the results to a BLE thermal printer, like the ones from Opulo.

This is perfect for what I was planning! Except I’m going to use AVRs instead of STMs. My project is to make an LM3914 replacement board, because you can’t buy those chips anymore. At least not from a vendor that can automatically solder them. Why. My requirement is that I can load it up with a memory card, plug in the board under test, program it, then have it read the LEDs and check resistances and power consumption and stuff. Most importantly, to do so in an idiot-proof method. There’s already code for an AVR field programmer out there, I’ll likely take that and add my own debug code atop it.

Great project! I've been having fun with the Puya PY32002A - can't beat a $0.12 ARM Cortex M0+, and SWD debugging is a total game changer.

Killer work man! Automating my calibration procedure is my next endeavor, loving the content so far. It's crazy how complicated it is to develop a universal fixture for bringing up boards in a production environment.

Great idea. The features are just right for DIY hobby projects.

Great idea! Could have used something like this on so many occasions. Automatic SWD programming is a messy affair, while the bus protocol is the same for ARM MCUs anyway, details like how to disable/reset/bypass security, the flash size and what address its located at, fuse bits and many other concerns are all highly variable. It might be possible to do it from an MCU for a handful of specific devices or maybe device families but making it general purpose would be very challenging. Without a doubt involving a small embedded Linux and controlling a debug access probe over USB via OpenOCD would be more versatile. Also opens the door to deploying new binaries over wifi (or even cloud) or doing remote debugging. Modern MCUs with ROM bootloaders make everything way easier -- imagine just loading a firmware bin over USB if the DUT comes online. Many also work over uart, spi or i2c and could be simpler than doing it over SWD.

Thanks for sharing your work. I am also implementing a complex factory testing solution for our devices so it was helpful to see how someone else solved for their uses case.

Where do you buy your pogo pins and can you find them for a reasonable price?

You are a couple of years too late. google tag connect

They're just expensive is all...

The OPA module is something very useful for me because an opamp can easily cost extra 10cents extra (usually 40 cents). And the DMA is very useful when I control many RGB LED via SPI. Without DMA I can easily get flickering if timer is also being used

All nice and well, but aren't you wearing your shirt inside out?

theres nothing wrong with a ch32 being in a product. it is a 32 bit soc. I rather see a chip i can reuse or replace than one that has no vendor or highly propiertary. I have seen wch chips in products already. Another reason i like wch chips is because they dont need external components for them to work. The external osc is optional and you can literally use it without any other support components if using a 3.3v or 5v supply

I recently bought a product that unfortunately came with a charger that has pogo pins with magnet. I need to replace this with a fixed connection.What 's the best way to fix it with attaching cable instead? Can I solder wires directly to the flat contactors that are supposed to have the pogo pins pressed against?

Looks awesome, would be sweet to use this connector style for charging some little LED projects I have.

So why, if you look a typical electronics supplier (like Mouser) do pogo pins cost upwards of a dollar and regular connectors half that much?

Very nice video Zach. We can see you put a lot of work into it, congrats. Py32 is a good choice. In future if you need cheaper, the Padauk line has a flash version that can be used for development, then move to the OTP in production once the code is tested.

Most common types of plastic only start to get really soft around 300C. So there is a decent chance your solder temperature is a good bit lower. Still for fume reasons I would not put a lot of them in the oven depending on the ventilation in your space. I checked reflow oven temps 220-250C for 120-240 seconds Okay, that's probably fine if you don't intensely sniff it the entire time.

You said pogo so many times that all I can think of is System of a Down...

Where is the finished product? I'd like to see the result that inspired all of your work!

There’s nothing professional and useful about displays in YT, We’d appreciate designing LED display from scratch or doodling with some products and controlling circuits to show images and vids

Large scale... Bed o' nails.

So cool to see a video about something I used to do at work. The company I was with would do lots of automotive parts, things like the boards in the dashboard display. I was mainly on the mechanical side of things. We had a standard test fixture design which we would make G10 inserts for rather than PCBs, so we would use the pogo pins from QA and wire them all to a connector at the back of the fixture. Is this something you do a lot at work or something you've figured out yourself? I am new to your channel. One other interesting thing from production electronics is wave solder pallets, though that is probably outside of the realm of hobbyist electronics.

I subscribed before you asked me to.

My mouse has an array of 16 of them on the side.

I work as a test engineer for series production testing. Mainly for functional testing, but we othen use test needles for connecting to test points on the PCB. These needles a commonly used in the business for electrical testing like ICT. Those needles come in many different shapes and can be a bit pricey. They are maDe to Be easely replaceable without soldering as these can wear out when talking about mass production. The hardest here actually is making the fixtures that must be made in precision to reliable connect to each test point. There can be up to hundrets of spring loaded needles on one fixture. It is basically its own engineering field.

i've never used them for this use case, but most other places i've encountered them, in end user and repair contexts, they've had issues that infuriated me. my current wireless earbuds use a particularly bad design that the predecessors didn't, meaning i can't trust them to charge for when i need them. after a string of other failures with earbuds, its quite annoying that such expensive sets have so many issues, and incorrectly used pogo pins might be the final straw for me to somehow find wired noise cancelling earbuds, or just fix my over-ear headphones.

Nice project! But hardly very good results. Each pcb needs unique fixtures and alignment doesn't work with vacuum on. 👍