[SolderParty] just announced FlexyPins (Twitter, alternative view) – bent springy clips that let you connect modules with castellated pins. With such clips, you can quickly connect and disconnect any castellated module, swapping them without soldering as you’re prototyping, testing things out, or pre-flashing modules before assembly. They’re reportedly gold-plated, and a pack of ~100 will set you back 6EUR, shipping not included.
Of course, this is basically “fancy pieces of wire”, purpose-shaped, gold-plated and, hopefully, made out of material that is springy enough and doesn’t snap easily after bending a few times. We’ve seen this concept used for prototyping before, with random pieces of wire doing a pretty good job of maintaining connectivity, but these clips bring it that much closer to production-grade. It also makes us wonder – just how hard it is to solder 30-40 of them into a circuit? Do they self-align enough with the footprints given, or do you have to hold them with tweezers at a peculiar angle as you solder them? Time will tell, of course.
Don’t expect to see them used in regular circuits, as they’re quite space-consuming. However, for those of us prototyping and manufacturing, this is one more tool in our arsenal, and we’ve already seen some fun uses for these. They could also be pretty useful for experimenting with firmware of proprietary castellated modules, letting you reuse the same development board between different modules as you tweak things. And, if you’re like us and got a drawer with dead NodeMCU ESP32 boards, having a springy breakout for testing ESP32 modules might come in handy.
You can likely make such pins yourself – we’ve reviewed this principle before, with a nice 3D-printed jig to match! Flashing and testing castellated modules before soldering them seems to be a popular scenario, and for the aforementioned ESP8266 alone, we’ve reviewed quite a few testing and flashing jigs – check out this 3D-printable one, or this Wemos-board-turned-pogopin-jig one!
We thank [Chaos] and [adrien] for sharing this with us!
