A little programming adapter for 4 x 2mm pitch pads

I recently had need to attach four wires to a set of pads on a device for programming its microcontroller. The pads for these sort of things are often on difficult to solve pitch, this one is 2mm which is not too bad.

Above is the target and solution.

The target is the four vias right next to the LEDs on the daughter module.

The solution starts with a section of PCB 2mm female SIL header strip, four P50-E2 0.68mm dia pogo pins pushed until they just read the other side of the insulation. The protruding header pins are tinned and the solder flows onto the end of the pogo pins fixing them (get the positions right). Then some wires soldered to the header pins, a little hot melt glue applied and some clear heat shrink applied, forming the glue to fill the void and provide a strain relief to the wires.

Works a treat.

I was able to use Silabs Flash Programming Utility to connect and read the flash (0x0-0xfbff) to a file. The file format is hex in single column data only, which can be converted to bin using the command xxd -r -p -c1 sik1000-hmtrp.txt sik1000-hmtrp.bin , and then dumped to a formatted dump with xxd sik1000-hmtrp.bin sik1000-hmtrp.dmp .