We’re all trying to make the Smart Home products smaller and less visible. Using coin cells instead of bulky cylindrical batteries significantly reduces the size of many products. The challenge with making products smaller is that the area available on the PCB for a debug header is in short supply.
Many customers I’ve worked with want to use less PCB real estate which means they come up with a custom set of test points. Typically a jig with spring loaded pins are used to contact to the PCB or more often wires are soldered to the PCB. The problem with this solution is that the jig is large, expensive and fragile. Soldering a cable to a board often results in a fragile connection where the cable can easily break a pin and not be immediately obvious. I’ve spent far too much time trying to figure out why I could program the part a minute ago but now I can’t only to realize the cable has a loose wire.
Unreliable custom cable debug connector
700 Series Debug Header
Fortunately Silicon Labs has a solution for the 700 series – use a 0.05″ spacing 10 pin SMT header. The Mini Simplicity Debug connector is described in AN958. If you have a little room then use the standard SMT header which is 6x6mm. If you are very tight on real estate then put down the pads for the thru-hole version of the connector but hand-solder the thru-hole header to the pads. Using just the pads results in a header only 3x6mm. You can’t tell me you can’t come up with 18sqmm to make the PCB debug reliable!
Either solution requires only a small amount of space on a single side of the PCB. Usually the header pads can be under a coin cell since during debug a power supply is used instead of the battery. This same header can be used for production programming using a jig to contact to the pads. Having a standard and reliable connection to the PCB will save you time during debug and on the production floor.
Reliable tiny debug connector unpopulated in production
Conclusion
No matter how tempted you might be to come up with your own cable/connector/test points, DON’T DO IT! Use the standard Mini Simplicity connector to save you so many headaches during debug. A solid, reliable debug connection is an absolute must otherwise you risk spinning your wheels chasing ghosts that are caused by a flakey connector. Take it from me, I’ve tried to debug just way too many of these over the years and it is not fun.
This article was also published on my blog at DrZWave.blog.
Z-Wave Knowledge Base
Use the tiny Mini Simplicity debug connector on your product - avoid unreliable JIGs!
We’re all trying to make the Smart Home products smaller and less visible. Using coin cells instead of bulky cylindrical batteries significantly reduces the size of many products. The challenge with making products smaller is that the area available on the PCB for a debug header is in short supply.
Many customers I’ve worked with want to use less PCB real estate which means they come up with a custom set of test points. Typically a jig with spring loaded pins are used to contact to the PCB or more often wires are soldered to the PCB. The problem with this solution is that the jig is large, expensive and fragile. Soldering a cable to a board often results in a fragile connection where the cable can easily break a pin and not be immediately obvious. I’ve spent far too much time trying to figure out why I could program the part a minute ago but now I can’t only to realize the cable has a loose wire.
700 Series Debug Header
Fortunately Silicon Labs has a solution for the 700 series – use a 0.05″ spacing 10 pin SMT header. The Mini Simplicity Debug connector is described in AN958. If you have a little room then use the standard SMT header which is 6x6mm. If you are very tight on real estate then put down the pads for the thru-hole version of the connector but hand-solder the thru-hole header to the pads. Using just the pads results in a header only 3x6mm. You can’t tell me you can’t come up with 18sqmm to make the PCB debug reliable!
Either solution requires only a small amount of space on a single side of the PCB. Usually the header pads can be under a coin cell since during debug a power supply is used instead of the battery. This same header can be used for production programming using a jig to contact to the pads. Having a standard and reliable connection to the PCB will save you time during debug and on the production floor.
Conclusion
No matter how tempted you might be to come up with your own cable/connector/test points, DON’T DO IT! Use the standard Mini Simplicity connector to save you so many headaches during debug. A solid, reliable debug connection is an absolute must otherwise you risk spinning your wheels chasing ghosts that are caused by a flakey connector. Take it from me, I’ve tried to debug just way too many of these over the years and it is not fun.
This article was also published on my blog at DrZWave.blog.