If you’re familiar with embedded electronics like Arduino, you might have noticed that the Cirque (which is what I decided to call the mote just now) does not have the usual ISP header found on other AVR boards like the Arduino and clones. Since all the pins are broken out, we figured “what’s the point?” – especially since you only need to program the Arduino bootloader once and can use the UART from there on out to load programs. The prototypes have been programmed by attaching wires to the appropriate IO lines and sticking them into a USBTiny.
This is incredibly tedious and error prone, as you might imagine. Fortunately, automated testing of circuit boards is an extremely common problem, so someone invented Pogo Pins – fancy little pins that are spring loaded and have tips that fit into circuit board holes.
I set out to make a fancy test jig for the Cirque Lisa so that we could program and test them *before* installing the screw terminals and without having a crazy mess of wires everywhere. I did the machining and jig assembly, then [Evan] soldered the test board together. Here’s the result:
Pretty awesome looking with all those pins, no? 
Both Sparkfun and Adafruit have tutorials on making pogo pin jigs if you’re interested in making your own. Both shops also sell them, but the ones in this jig came from Sparkfun:
Read on for pics of the build process and a cool video of what I think I need to build next ^_~
I started the build with the stabilizer plate. This piece of plastic will help keep the long pins straight in the jig:
During assembly, one of the ATmega pads lifted on this board, so it was used as the base for this jig. The board was bolted to the plate and used as a template for the pin holes:
The drill press had too much vibration to make these tiny holes accurately, so I used a milling machine instead:
Perfect fit
Test fitting all of the pins. A welding tip cleaner came in handy to clean out a few of the holes:
Cutting some nylon spacers that will fit between the board and the alignment plate:
I used a scrap of 0.25″ aluminum to make the base for the jig. The slot in the middle isn’t functional, it just came with the scrap. The holes are being tapped for the 4-40 all-thread that will hold the jig together. The rods will be held in the holes with Loctite:
Assembling the jig:
(Almost) finished product. The alignment rods will be cut down from where they are in this photo:
Something to aspire to:
