[SolderParty] just now announced FlexyPins (Twitter, alternate view) – Curved spring clips that allow you to connect modules with knurled pins. Clips like this allow you to quickly connect and disconnect any knurled module, swap them out without soldering while prototyping, trying things out, or pre-flashing modules before mounting. They are said to be gold plated and a ~100 pack will cost you 6 EUR plus shipping.
Of course, these are actually “pretty bits of wire”, specially formed, gold plated and hopefully made of material that is resilient enough and won’t break easily after bending a few times. We’ve used this concept for prototyping before, where random bits of wire do a pretty good job of maintaining connectivity, but these clips bring it much closer to production quality. We also wonder: how hard is it to solder 30-40 of them in a circuit? Do they align themselves sufficiently with the given footprints, or do you have to hold them at an odd angle with tweezers while soldering them? Time will tell of course.
Don’t expect them to be used in regular circuits as they take up quite a lot of space. However, for those of us prototyping and manufacturing, this is another tool in our arsenal, and we’ve already seen some nice uses for this one† They can also be very useful for experimenting with proprietary jagged module firmware, allowing you to reuse the same development board between different modules as you tweak things. And if, like us, you have a drawer of dead NodeMCU ESP32 cards, a spring-loaded breakout for testing ESP32 modules can come in handy.
You can probably make such pins yourself – we’ve covered this principle before, with a nice 3D printed mold to go with it! Flashing and testing knurled modules before soldering seems to be a popular scenario, and for the aforementioned ESP8266 alone we’ve looked at quite a few test and flash jigs – check out this 3D printable, or this Wemos board turned- pogopin jig one!
we thank [Chaos] and [adrien] to share this with us!
This post FlexyPins could help with those pesky, cast modules
was original published at “https://hackaday.com/2022/03/07/flexypins-might-help-with-those-pesky-castellated-modules/”
