Solderless design?

[tlaurion]

Hello there! Nice project!

Was wondering why solderless designs are not existing yet?

Not so related and pinning of course different, but having something like this for SOIC-8, SOIC-16, and WSON would be totally amazing and would facilitate spispy and reprogramming so much!

Thoughts?

[Thrilleratplay]

I had an idea for a similar project that I can only equate to the facehugger from the Alien movie. Instead of a board that around the chip, a piece of flexible printed circuit would lay over the IC and, using the facehugger analogy, the tail would be the connector and each wire/arm would be go to each pin on the SOIC. Simple adhesive would hold the FPC to the chip casing and maybe user conductive glue to attach the pins to the wire endpoints. I don't know the tolerances these materials have to heat and general wear if left inside of a laptop. Also the ease of use for newbies, if you bridge solder, you can fix that but not sure if the same can be said for conductive glue.

[tlaurion]

@fgervais
Some discussion happened over Slack SpiSpy channel, also recently bridged to Matrix

[fgervais]

It would probably work as-is unsoldered just with solder on the pads and glued in with Kapton tape. Though maybe a little flimsy.

If not then just a small pcb with 8 grippy pogo pins a bit like those but smaller: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2429. That would probably work.

[tlaurion]

@fgervais my OP is pointing out on a total solderless design showing the connection area to WII motherboard in a button press design on chips to be reprogrammed. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough there.

My question in this created issue was more into having your insightsand thoughts on a similar design, particularly for SIOC8 where spot on in place reprogramming or spispy is desired, without soldering nor using a tear too-friendly clip nor probes.
A button pressure design would limit wear on clips by being oriented by the chip itself for newcomers and would also facilitate and speed up massive reprogramming sessions while reducing possible user error in manipulations.

Linked discussions talk about different use cases, where your current design is definitely useful on testing platforms aimed at staying testing platforms, where in place reprogrammers currently using Pamona clip are not useful in all scenario, for example when trying to reprogram a t430/w530 without having to disassemble all the laptop, if of course, the button design would be low profile and low additional footprint to be able to go under certain areas

[tlaurion]

Some inverted designs (bulky) were pointed out. If that design could be adapted to be used as a replacement in on site reprogramming, that would be the idea in this issue discussion :)