Raspberry Pi Stand-Alone Programmer

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Contributors: QCPete
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Capsense for the Win!

A long time ago we switched from using a mechanical button to engage testing to capsense pads. Even if a mechanical button is rated for 100K cycles, it will probably die before that, and what a pain to have to replace.

On all of our test jigs, we use the capsense library and two I/O pins on the Arduino to "read" a capsense pad. Rather than going this route on the Raspberry Pi, I opted to put a dedicated capsense IC on the HAT and then just read the I/O like a digital pin to engage programming.

Top View of the Pi_Grammer with Dedicated Capacitive Touch IC

This worked great... until... the darn chip when EOL. Eeek!

It turned out that it was only the specific package of the capsense IC that went EOL, and that the manufacturer was going to continue to make a smaller QFN version of the chip. So we revised the HAT and all is well. This beautiful bin of HATs arrived on my desk. Thanks production!!

Bin of Pi_Grammers

The last step was to slap these HATs on the 60+ Raspberry Pis sitting on my desk and deploy to production!

SparkFun Production Bins